Executive Intelligence Review, Volume 47, Number 36, September 4, 2020

- Cover

- Masthead

- PDF edition Table of Contents — Volume 47, Number 36, September 4, 2020

- I. Raise the Level of Strategic Deliberation

- Schiller Institute Labor Day Conference to Rehearse Summit for Peace and a New Bretton Woods

- ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST Business-As-Usual Is Deadly: We Must Elevate the Quality of Strategic Deliberation

- II. The Lincoln Precedent

- Applying the Lessons of the Lincoln Administration To Win the War Against Oligarchy Today by Lyndon LaRouche (1998)

- RE-CREATING THE REPUBLIC How Abraham Lincoln Organized Victory for the Union by H. Graham Lowry

- III. How History Is Made in the Individual Mind

- Colonizing Mars: The Future of Man in Space—Three Views Includes unpublished Wernher Von Braun-Krafft Ehricke correspondence by Marsha Freeman

- Einstein’s Friend, Walther Rathenau: The Agapic Personality in Politics and Diplomacy by Judy Hodgkiss (part 2 of 2)

FDR’s Unfinished Business:

Ending Geopolitics

Founder: Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (1922–2019)

Editor-in-Chief: Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Co-Editors: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher, Robert Ingraham, Tony Papert

Managing Editor: Stephanie Ezrol

Editorial Staff: David Cherry, Charles Notley

Technology: Marsha Freeman

Transcriptions: Katherine Notley

Ebooks: Richard Burden

Graphics: Alan Yue

Photos: Stuart Lewis

Circulation Manager: Stanley Ezrol

INTELLIGENCE DIRECTORS

Asia: Michael Billington

Economics: Marcia Merry Baker, Paul Gallagher

History: Anton Chaitkin

Ibero-America: Dennis Small

United States: Debra Freeman

INTERNATIONAL BUREAUS

Berlin: Elke Fimmen

Copenhagen: Tom Gillesberg

Lima: Sara Madueño

Melbourne: Robert Barwick

Mexico City: Gerardo Castilleja Chávez

New Delhi: Ramtanu Maitra

Paris: Christine Bierre

Stockholm: Ulf Sandmark

United Nations, N.Y.C.: Richard Black, Leni Rubinstein

Washington, D.C.: William Jones

Wiesbaden: Rainer Apel

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EIR Contents

www.larouchepub.com — Volume 47, Number 36, September 4, 2020

Cover This Week

NARA

President Franklin Roosevelt and President Edwin Barclay of Liberia, January 27, 1943.

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FDR’S UNFINISHED BUSINESS: ENDING GEOPOLITICS

I. RAISE THE LEVEL OF STRATEGIC DELIBERATION

3 Schiller Institute Labor Day Conference to Rehearse Summit for Peace and a New Bretton Woods

4 ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Business-As-Usual Is Deadly: We Must Elevate the Quality of Strategic Deliberation

II. THE LINCOLN PRECEDENT

9 Applying the Lessons of the Lincoln Administration To Win the War Against Oligarchy Today

by Lyndon LaRouche

January 17, 1998

15 RE-CREATING THE REPUBLIC

How Abraham Lincoln Organized Victory for the Union

by H. Graham Lowry

III. HOW HISTORY IS MADE IN THE INDIVIDUAL MIND

27 Colonizing Mars: The Future of Man in Space—Three Views

by Marsha Freeman

Includes previously unpublished correspondence between Wernher von Braun and Krafft Ehricke.

33 Einstein’s Friend, Walther Rathenau: The Agapic Personality in Politics and Diplomacy

by Judy Hodgkiss

PART TWO OF TWO PARTS

I. Raise the Level of Strategic Deliberation

Schiller Institute Labor Day Conference to Rehearse Summit for Peace and a New Bretton Woods

Aug. 29—This Sept. 5-6 weekend, the International Schiller Institute will be holding one of the most important of its hundreds of international conferences and seminars of the last decade. The two-day international online conference will review the need for, and potential achievements of a proposed summit process among the heads of state of the five permanent UN Security Council members—the United States, China, Russia, France, and the UK. Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed this summit and has organized for it, with the UN General Assembly about to meet in September.

Schiller Institute President Helga Zepp-LaRouche has been appealing to these powers, since early January, to drop confrontation and collaborate through such summits, to create credit to rebuild the world economy from its present crisis, including developing new medical capacities to fight the Covid-19 pandemic in the developing countries. She calls that potential collaboration a new Bretton Woods agreement. Lyndon LaRouche designed such a new Bretton Woods credit agreement and organized for it for decades before his death in 2019.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in a webcast Aug. 26, warned of the extremely dangerous escalation of confrontation between the United States, and both China and Russia, that includes aggressive military demonstrations that could go out of control. She called the Labor Day Schiller Institute conference a crucial step in establishing how, and on what urgent missions, these nations can work together for peace and economic recovery and development. The idea, therefore, is to shape the actions of the permanent five members of the UN Security Council.

The list of speakers is not complete. All times are Eastern Daylight Time.

War Drive Towards Armageddon or a New Paradigm Among Sovereign Nations United by the Common Aims of Mankind?

Saturday, September 5, 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.

PANEL I Overcoming Geopolitics: Why a P-5 Summit Is

Urgently Needed Now

Helga Zepp-LaRouche (Germany), founder and President, Schiller Institute

Marco Zanni (Italy), chairman of the Identity and Democracy faction of the European Parliament

William Binney (U.S.), former Technical Director, National Security Agency

Ed Lozansky (U.S.), Pres., American University in Moscow; Moscow State University

Martin Sieff (U.S.), Senior Foreign Correspondent, Washington Times, UPI

Jim Jatras (U.S.), former Foreign Relations Advisor, US Senate Republican Caucus

Colonel Richard H. Black, Ret. (U.S.), former head of the Army’s Criminal Law Division at the Pentagon; former State Senator, Virginia

Saturday, September 5, 3 p.m. – 6 p.m.

PANEL II The Role of Science in Creating Mankind’s Future

Jason Ross (U.S.), Schiller Institute Science Advisor

Leading scientists from Russia, the U.S. and France

Sunday, September 6, 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.

PANEL III The Belt and Road Initiative Becomes the World

Land-Bridge: FDR’s Unfinished Business

Dr. Joycelyn Elders (U.S.), former Surgeon General of the United States

Michele Geraci (Italy), former Undersecretary of State for Economic Development

Dr. Natalia Vitrenko (Ukraine), President, Progressive Socialist Party, former member of parliament and presidential candidate

Marcelo Muñoz (Spain), founder and President Emeritus of Cátedra China, dean of Spanish businessmen in China

Marlette Kyssama-Nsona (Republic of Congo), pharmaco-chemist, political executive of the Pan-African League-UMOJA and specialist in public health issues

Sunday, September 6, 3 p.m. – 6 p.m.

PANEL IV Building Trust in International Relations: The Role of Classical Culture and Combatting World Famine

Jacques Cheminade (France), President, Solidarité & Progrès, former presidential candidate

Marcia Merry Baker (U.S.), EIR Editorial Board

Robert Baker and American farm leaders

Fred Haight (Canada), Schiller Institute

Michael Billington (U.S.), Asia Intelligence Director, EIR

Beethoven Mass in C, Schiller Institute NYC Chorus

Register for the conference at

https://schillerinstitute.nationbuilder.com/20200905_conference#reg

ZEPP-LAROUCHE WEBCAST

Business-As-Usual Is Deadly:

We Must Elevate the Quality of Strategic Deliberation

UN/Manuel Elias

The UN Security Council. A summit of its Permanent Five members has been proposed by Russian President Putin, in what may be the last chance to avoid World War III.

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We present here an edited transcript of excerpts from the Schiller Institute’s weekly “Dialogue with Helga Zepp-LaRouche” of August 27, 2020, with Harley Schlanger. The video of the full webcast may be found here.

Harley Schlanger: There are a number of things going on that deserve attention, but the most important is the upcoming Schiller Institute conference on September 5th and September 6th. Helga, I think that’s a good place to start. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the conference?

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: This conference will try to elevate the discussion to a different, higher, plane. Look at all the different crises which are accumulating and expanding. We have a pandemic. We have an economic collapse. We have an extremely dangerous escalation of confrontation between the U.S. and China; but also, really, with Russia. There is the danger that this all will go completely out of control.

This conference is a critical part of the effort to establish a new paradigm—to discuss the need to have a completely new economic system, a credit system, a New Bretton Woods system, to reestablish the idea of worldwide economic development with the World Land-Bridge, to establish the idea of a world health system. Key is the dialogue of civilizations, the only basis upon which the world and the different nations of the world can work together and have a future of peace, and not of war. So this is designed to be a very important intervention, to also inspire some of the discussions at the UN General Assembly. We are especially focused on the P-5 Summit called for by President Putin, a summit of the permanent five members of the UN Security Council.

I urge you to find the time to be part of this conference. If you register, you will have access to live translation into many languages, and be able to participate in the Q&A. Reserve those dates, September 5 and 6: It is going to be the most important event, at least of this period.

C-SPAN

Left: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, here speaking to the Republican National Convention from Jerusalem, August 26, 2020, promoted war hysteria against China. Right: Senator Rand Paul, speaking to the Republican National Convention, August 26, 2020. He emphasized that President Trump has been trying to end the endless wars.

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Schlanger: This will be an online conference. More information is available on the website of the Schiller Institute, which is the sponsor of the conference.

Helga, we’ve seen the U.S. party conventions unfolding. Mostly what we learned from the Democratic Convention is that most of the Democrats there hate Donald Trump. The Republican Convention has had some interesting developments, both in terms of what’s been said there, and the reaction to it. What’s your impression from what you’ve seen so far?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, the bad thing to start off with was this unbelievably bellicose speech which was made by Pompeo, from Jerusalem. He had nothing better to do than to attack the “aggressive policies of the Communist Party of China” for “spreading death”—the language was just so provocative. So this was bad.

U.S. Senator Rand Paul, on the other side, was in stark contrast to that. He pointed out that the Trump Administration is the first since the Reagan Administration that did not start a new war, and President Trump on the contrary has been trying to implement his policy of ending the endless wars.

The Democrats, in their comments about this convention, really show that they have lost it. Hillary Clinton, for sure, lost it, after she lost the election in 2016, and she can’t, somehow, overcome it. She gave the advice to Biden, to under no circumstances concede the election until the last vote is counted—all this idea that there will be a turmoil around the ballots, the absentee ballots, that Trump will refuse to leave the White House even if he loses the election. This discussion by these two colonels [Nagl and Yingling], that the military should remove President Trump from office, which was then countered by the Pentagon. But we have preparations under way in the direction of having a big Constitutional crisis, come Election Day.

The Democrats are clearly playing that game. And then, Pelosi, used unbelievable language. She said, “the enemy of the state” is living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. These Democrats really have lost it. They are the war party, they’re relentless in their attempts to get Trump out of the White House, one way or another.

Melania made a quite interesting speech, for which she got a lot of appreciation, except from the London Guardian, which naturally cannot say anything positive about the Trumps.

USAF

In a clear provocation, a U.S. Air Force spy plane entered a no-fly zone where a PLA drill with live ammunition was underway in the north of China.

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Schlanger: You mentioned the Rand Paul statement against the endless wars. It’s clear that Biden intends to continue these wars. Now, one of the problems on the ending of the wars, is Pompeo, who, as you pointed out, is clearly aligning himself with Biden and the war party as a whole. The military confrontations in the Gulf of Bohai—what’s the latest going on there, Helga?

Zepp-LaRouche: I think this confrontation policy by the U.S. military in the Pacific, in the South China Sea, and in the north of China, is reaching a very dangerous dimension, we could have another U-2 moment. There was an incident in which a U.S. spy plane flew into the no-fly zone where the PLA had a drill in the north of China, with live ammunition. This was a clear provocation, a violation of Chinese airspace. The Chinese reacted almost immediately, sending two missiles from two different locations to the South China Sea, where, in the recent period, the presence of both U.S. military planes and also U.S. military vessels has been increasing.

It is quite visible that the faction in the United States that does want to decouple from China economically, are fully on their way. The U.S. put out a list of 24 Chinese firms involved in different aspects of construction in these artificial islands in the South China Sea region and will be putting sanctions on them. That means that any firm cooperating with them will be hit by these economic effects. There is no way that can end well. The U.S. and Chinese economies are so dependent on each other, so intermingled. The U.S. and China need to cooperate in all fields, especially in fighting the pandemic, developing vaccines, and distributing them all over the world.

IAEA

International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors in Iran verify compliance with the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2018.

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Schlanger: We also have the stunt pulled by Secretary of State Pompeo, demanding that the UN Security Council snap back the sanctions against Iran. This was rejected by virtually everyone on the UN Security Council. Pompeo said it doesn’t matter, we’re going to go it alone.

What signal does this send to the world?

Zepp-LaRouche: On this snapback vote, that’s just incredible. Everybody agrees that the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action] agreement with Iran was useful, productive. It did get Iran to stop its nuclear weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency was just in Iran and inspected all the relevant sites. They have found no indication that Iran was not complying. Everybody agrees that this was a very important agreement, and everybody wants to keep it.

Pompeo, after being defeated in the UN vote, wrote this letter. Now we have a situation in which Russia, China, also Germany, Great Britain, France, and eight other countries, all are saying they disagree with the U.S. position. Pompeo will not back down, unless he’s told to do so by Trump. He is planning to go ahead with it. Note that Pompeo announced this deadline of 30 days, on August 20th, if you project that 30 days you get into the second half of September, which is exactly when the UN General Assembly starts to work in earnest. I think they start on September 15th. Soon after, the heads of state will come and give speeches, virtual or otherwise.

This is clearly designed to create a major crisis in the middle of this process, and ruin the chances of this P-5 summit which is being promoted by Putin. That summit is urgently necessary. President Trump, President Xi, and President Putin need to all meet, and also Macron and Boris Johnson, but especially the first three Presidents. They have to get over this confrontation and geopolitical nightmare, which we see playing out right now.

So, I cannot predict what will happen, but you cannot sanction the whole world without causing reactions by all of these countries. So this is a no-win policy, unless you are trying to create chaos and havoc for some ulterior motive, and that’s what it looks like Pompeo is really up to.

Schlanger: I want to come back to one thing on the sanctions question against China, and the decoupling question: Is it possible that people like Wilbur Ross and Navarro and the people pushing this hard line against China are unaware of the damage to the U.S. economy if there is a decoupling with China?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, it puts into question their economic understanding, for sure, because many of the companies which are hit by the sanctions are really American companies and the U.S. buyer will have to pay the price.

I think the idea to go back to two blocs is just not going to work, or it will not work to the advantage of the U.S. and Europe, because, if you look at the figures right now, the only country which managed to have a growth rate, is China, in the first half of this year. Great Britain had a collapse of the GDP by 20%; France almost 14%; Germany, about 10%; U.S. about 10%. But China had a growth rate I think of 3%, but it’s a growth rate. It’s not what it used to be, but I think it’s very clear that they have managed to deal with all of this much better.

This is really going backwards in history. We should look forward and have a policy of solving the many problems, including world hunger, together. The World Food Program just put out a report a couple of weeks ago, an urgent warning, that in order to deal with the famine, which is in part escalated by the pandemic, they would need $5 billion. If you think about the trillions which were pumped into the system by the central banks since last September, $5 billion is really, almost peanuts. And what did the World Food Program get? $750 million, and they just issued an urgent call that they need, urgently, $4 billion, or otherwise a lot of people will die of hunger.

So we have these real problems, and I think we should all lose patience with these geopolitical games, because it goes to the detriment of a lot of people who lose their lives as a result of it.

CC/Michał Siergiejevicz

Alexei Navalny, the latest pawn in the campaign to demonize Russian President Putin, in Moscow on July 23, 2020.

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Schlanger: One of those geopolitical games is almost so predictable, that, as we’re moving toward the possibility of a P-5 summit, we have another so-called Russian “poisoning”—the so-called Navalny case. What do you make of this, Helga?

Zepp-LaRouche: Well, this is almost a classical case. It’s the same script as the Skripal incident and all the stories about other people who were supposedly murdered by Putin. There is no proof. Navalny always gets characterized as the big critic of the Kremlin, but really, he is a relatively unimportant, right-wing, populist nationalist. He’s not exactly somebody who has any standing in Russia, whatsoever, but he’s being played, again and again, by the Western media as the big opponent of Putin.

He had some kind of trouble. On a flight from Tomsk in Siberia en route to Moscow, he fell unconscious. They had to divert the plane to Omsk. He went to the hospital there; then there was this big story that he was poisoned. Eventually a plane was organized from Germany with a medical team: They flew him into the Charité Clinic in Berlin where he is being treated now.

Now, the doctors just said that they found a substance in his blood which could be poisoning, but it’s the substance which also belongs to certain medications which you have to take for diabetes, and all kinds of other things. So the statement by the Charité is actually not totally affirmative that it was poisoning at all, but naturally, all the media go with it.

There are a couple of questions which should be asked. Who is paying for all of this, because to have a chartered medical plane and a whole team of doctors on standby for quite some time, costs a small fortune, so the question is, who is organizing that? This is all part of creating the environment where you can keep the confrontation, the demonization against Russia, against China. This is all a preparation for World War III, if it’s not being stopped.

Schlanger: Finally, in terms of some of the political situations, we have the outbreak of riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following a shooting of an African American man by police. It appears as though a major part of the Democratic program is to paint Trump as a racist and unleash chaos in the American cities. But they never talk about the other part of this, the unemployment, the poverty—how would you address this question of so-called “social justice”?

Zepp-LaRouche: Our program, which is what my late husband had designed, is the Four Laws: You have to stop the speculation and the casinos with Glass-Steagall, you have to have banking separation; you have to go back to a Hamiltonian National Bank; and then you have to issue long-term, low interest credit for investment. The United States needs urgently investment in infrastructure; a fast train system is urgently needed to connect all major cities, to bring real development into the undeveloped areas, and have the people who are now sort of the “Forgotten Man” participate in that.

I think if President Trump would use his election campaign,—obviously, he cannot get it really done now, because the Democrats will sabotage everything that he proposes—but if he would now announce a real industrialization program for the time after the election, or find some way of moving this into the public eye, I think that that could cool down the situation.

So I think what is needed is really the LaRouche program for the United States: We want to create 50 million productive jobs. There are enough people who would cooperate with President Trump for a real program, especially if it would be a worldwide program, including bringing development into Africa, into Latin America, but also, especially the United States.

What we are trying to do is to discuss these ideas: This will be also a big part of the September 5-6 conference of the Schiller Institute, how to reindustrialize the United States, how to overcome this terrible underdevelopment in many developing countries, which shouldn’t be called “developing countries” because they’re not developing; they’re, indeed, having an incredible crisis right now.

We have to bring together an alliance of forces worldwide to say that we need a new, just world economic order, which allows the survival of every human being and every nation on this planet. If you agree with that approach, attend this conference on September 5th and 6th. Become a member of the Schiller Institute. Get active with us, because this is a period in which the decision of war and peace, of having a future of humanity or self-annihilation, is upon us.

Schlanger: So Helga, I guess that’s what we have for this week, and we’ll see you again next week.

Zepp-LaRouche: Yes, till next week.

Visit the LaRouche Legacy Foundation website

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II. The Lincoln Precedent

JANUARY 17, 1998

Applying the Lessons of the

Lincoln Administration To Win

the War Against Oligarchy Today

by Lyndon LaRouche

Mr. LaRouche’s answer to the following question at a Schiller Institute conference has never before been published. The questioner said: “I know how the organization likes to look back, reflect on history, and pick out the good things that have been done in the past, and recreate those. My question deals with this. Earlier today, you mentioned that in the 1800s, during the Lincoln administration, that that was our best opportunity for economic development and growth. Also, this could also apply to maybe the Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations and whatever, but I like to stick to the Lincoln example.

“But, what was it? Was there something that caused the paradigm shift in the way the public in general thought, that made them discover, ‘hey, we’ve been electing the wrong type of people. Now, let’s make a change, and elect the right type of person.’ Because, for example, today, if you put a good candidate in front of people, since they’ve been educated by the boob tube and whatever, they still wouldn’t vote for the good candidate. You’ve proved that many times yourself. What dynamic was in the workings, to cause people to wake up and say ‘hey, we need to do this.’”

America’s technology, on display at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, was the most advanced in the world.

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First of all is: what was the nature of the Lincoln-Carey program, in its 1861-1876 phase? The significance of 1876 is, that this was the great Centennial celebration of the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, which was an international festival, in which the accomplishments of the United States in economy and technology were featured at the Philadelphia fair. This coincided with the first efforts by the enemies of the United States from within, to destroy the United States system, beginning 1873, with the bankrupting of Jay Cooke, in order to bring the United States back under the control of the London bankers, and their New York City and New England stooges.

After 1876

So therefore, 1876 is a turning point, which represents the cumulative high point of a period of development of about 15 years of economy, despite efforts already in place to disrupt it. Sometimes the product is finished after the plant is about to be shut down, you know, this sort of thing.

CC BY-SA 3.0

German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in his study in 1886.

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So, this model of the American System, the 1876 model, was adopted by Germany, that is, by the national economy faction in Germany. It was adopted by [Chancellor Otto von] Bismarck shortly after that, who changed his policy, who introduced a social welfare policy into Germany as part of this and broke with the British. It was introduced into Russia through the scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev, who was the great railroad builder, and the great developer of many industries in Russia, together with his friends, including his friend, a younger man, Graf Sergei Witte, Finance Minister and, for a time, the Prime Minister of Russia, who was eliminated by the British with the 1905 Revolution and things like that. And Russia was rearmed afterward, but was only rearmed with British and French support, especially French support, after 1907, 1908, in order to build up Russia for war against Germany, because Russia had become, after the 1905 Revolution, a complete tool of the Anglo-French forces, in a conspiracy to destroy Germany.

And, up to that time, up until 1898, approximately, and in that period; 1894, Japan broke with the United States, with the Sino-Japanese war, and went over to the British side totally. And Japan was enemy of the United States, from 1894, until the end of World War II. As a matter of fact, the attack on Pearl Harbor was originally planned by the British and Japanese together, in the early 1920s, when the British and the Japanese were planning to conduct a war against the United States, in the context of the Naval Power Treaty agreements, the so-called Locarno, etc., business.

Sergei Lvovich Levitsky, 1870

Tsar Alexander II of Russia.

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But, in that period, from the Lincoln period, from the victory in the Civil War, until approximately the end of the Nineteenth Century, the allies of the United States were, or became, Russia. We had no allies before then; none. We had only one thing, we had Morocco. And the United States had an alliance with the Moroccans against the Barbary pirates, early in the Nineteenth Century. That was our only ally, from about 1793, 1789, our only ally, until the 1850s. And our first important ally came in the 1850s, in terms of Russia, Alexander II of Russia. We were isolated.

The victory in the Civil War established the United States, particularly this development, leading into 1876, as the leading economic power in the world. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the United States was the leading military power in the world. The United States was, technologically, the most advanced nation in the world, all of these good things. And a lot of people said, “Hey, this is a great model, let’s work with this.” Among the first to join the United States was Japan. The Meiji Restoration was the result of the United States’ success in influencing the Japanese to imitate the United States. And Henry Carey sent E. Peshine Smith, one of his students, to Japan, as consultant to the Meiji Restoration, in order to design the industrial economy of Japan.

Friends and Allies

Then you had Russia, of course, which was an ally of the United States. Germany was an ally of the United States, especially after 1876. France became an ally of the United States. It had been the enemy of the United States, a British ally, the enemy of the United States, until Napoleon III was sent into the ashcan, or back to Britain, which was pretty much the same thing. And it remained an ally of the United States until 1898, when it went over, back to the other side, back to the British side. So, this is this period.

Now, what happened in this period? The problem was, is that because of the isolation of the United States, every power in Europe, every power of the Holy Alliance, every nation in South and Central America, which was allied with the Holy Alliance, plus Britain, plus Russia, which was a part of the Holy Alliance, were enemies of the United States. We had, except for Morocco, we had no allies outside the United States; none.

Copy of a Philip Haas daguerreotype, 1843. President John Quincy Adams, guardian of the American System.

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Though we had friends in Mexico, like the movement in Mexico, which were called the Protectionists, which were tied to John Quincy Adams. You had movements in Colombia, connected through the American System, through Germany, and things like that. We had many movements in Ibero-America in the early Nineteenth Century, which tended to be wiped out, which were allied to the United States as a cause, in the early Nineteenth Century. Many of these, either directly through the United States, as in the case of the Mexican protectionist movement, which was directly connected to John Quincy Adams. Or movements such as that of Colombia, which was the German movement, which was connected to the republicans in this movement later in Germany.

Thomas Jefferson in a portrait by Gilbert Stuart. His administration was a disaster.

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So, we were destroyed, virtually. Jefferson and Madison were administrations which were under British control. Now, Thomas Jefferson was not a traitor, but Jefferson was a confused mind. He was sort of the Bill Clinton of his age—William Jefferson Clinton. I suppose that has it right.

As long as he was working with Benjamin Franklin, and under Franklin’s influence, Jefferson’s positive side came out, though basically he was a Lockean. But once Franklin was dead, and he came under some perverse French influences, French philosophical influences, he became a confused mind. He returned somewhat to himself in his last years; but, as President, he was a disaster. He was just less a disaster than the outright traitor, Aaron Burr.

James Madison had foisted upon him, as Tony Chaitkin would explain to anybody who needs to know, a Dolly. Now, men should not play with dollies, particularly older men. And, Dolly was a creature of Aaron Burr. The key guy was Albert Gallatin, who was a British agent, who was Secretary of Treasury. And the United States adopted a free trade policy, somewhat like that which Newt Gingrich likes, during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. So, that was a disaster.

Then, a patriot came back to power, partly because Dolly, when the British were invading Washington, Dolly grabbed her husband, who was really her Dolly, and dragged him off somewhere in Virginia to hide. And James Monroe stayed on post in Washington, and defended Washington, and became the President of the United States, and restored the United States to its dignities. He was succeeded by John Quincy Adams, who was probably the greatest genius the United States had in politics, at any one point. And he was the center of this sort of thing for the United States.

But, during this period, we had friends in Europe, but they weren’t in power. Our friends in Europe included the circles of Lazare Carnot, of the École Polytechnique. They included circles in Germany, the Schiller circles in Germany, and things of that sort.

West Point and the Corps of Engineers

Among the benefits we had from Europe, was that in 1814, some people fled France, the French Bourbon Restoration, which was the Holy Alliance restoration, the British restoration, and went to the United States, and went to West Point, and worked with Commandant Sylvanus Thayer in the rebuilding of West Point, after the War of 1812. West Point became the center of science and engineering in the United States during that period. And from that, we got the Corps of Engineers.

The Corps of Engineers, as provided by the École Polytechnique, was based on the work of Gaspard Monge and his associates in science, and was based on the work of Lazare Carnot, who was the inventor of the principle of machine tool design. It was Lazare Carnot, who, in about a year and a half to two years of his influence over French military policy, applied the machine tool design principle to the conduct and logistics of warfare. He was the first developer of mass production. For example, his mass production—within a year and a half—of French mobile field artillery, changed the character of warfare, among other things that he did.

So, the United States developed an engineering capability, including a machine tool design capability, centered around West Point, and associated with the U.S. Corps of Engineers. And so the patriots continued. Benjamin Franklin’s great-grandson, was a key figure in this operation, directly working with Gauss, and with Alexander von Humboldt in Germany. French science was the original science in the United States. After that, German science, the science of Gauss, Alexander von Humboldt, became American science. The U.S. Coastal Geodetic Survey was an offshoot of the work of Carl Gauss from Germany, for example.

Then we had a bunch of bums. We had outright traitors. Jackson, Andrew Jackson. His controller, a London-controlled Manhattan banker, Martin Van Buren. We had President James Polk, another British agent, a real pig, against whom John Quincy Adams fought his last battle, and Lincoln fought one of his first important battles. You had outright traitors: Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan. These were all free traders, just like Newt Gingrich. Just like the John Birch Society. All free traders and they ruined the United States. They were for free trade, no protection of industry.

The Confederate Insurrection

Well, time came. A conflict was developed in the United States, not about slavery. The conflict was simple: the British were determined to destroy the United States. Their method was to break it up into several parts. The British had three assets in the United States: the New England Yankee opium trader families, the ancestors of McGeorge Bundy; the New York bankers, which included people like Aaron Burr, who was a British agent, an agent directly of British intelligence, British foreign intelligence, and of Baring’s Bank. You had people like Van Buren, a British agent, who destroyed our credit system through his stooge, who developed the so-called Land Bank system, and destroyed this national banking.

LoC 1855

August Belmont, Sr., who controlled the Democratic Party, was a traitor and a British agent.

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Some idiots think that somehow Jackson was, you know, a “populist.” Yeah, he was a populist, but, like most populists, he was an idiot! And he’s a hero because he opposed the bankers. What bankers did he oppose? The patriotic bankers, in favor of the British bankers. 1837, we had the Panic; almost destroyed the United States. Then we had, in the 1840s, Polk, who almost destroyed the United States, betrayed the United States, a British agent. President Franklin Pierce, a British agent. August Belmont, a British agent. The Morgan interests, British agents. And we had the Southern slaveowners.

These three layers have been the curse of the United States.

All right. So, the plan was, the British plan was to start a war between two allies. Remember, the New England slave abolitionists and the Southern slaveowners were members of the same faction. See, the New England abolitionists produced textiles, with slave-produced cotton. The Lowells, and that crowd. Pigs.

Now, the idea was to divide the United States into several parts, the same idea which Prince Philip recently proposed in Washington, D.C.: the dismemberment of the United States into several parts, as a part of environmentalism, ecology, or something.

The Confederacy plot was a plot to get a war started between the secessionist Confederacy and other parts of the United States, in order to get a peace agreement, of which McClellan, General McClellan, was a part— a peace agreement, to establish the recognition of the independence of the Confederacy, which would result in the dismemberment of the United States into a bunch of warring baronies. And Belmont says so in his letter. And he was the controlling agent. He controlled the Democratic Party, so if you think you’ve got problems in the Democratic Party now, we had it then, too. August Belmont, who controlled the Democratic Party, was a traitor, and a British agent, and so was George McClellan. George McClellan refused to win battles when he could, because he was for a separate peace, to recognize the secession. So he would fight to defend Washington, but he wouldn’t fight to destroy Lee’s army when he could.

Alexander Gardiner

Abraham Lincoln introduced the machine tool principle, thereby making the U.S. economy powerful enough to crush the principle of slavery and thus win the war.

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Abraham Lincoln Launches the Machine Tool Principle

Those are the conditions. So suddenly, a crisis erupts. And, through a combination of forces, Abraham Lincoln, who represents the opposition to this, comes to power. And Lincoln does something which Bill Clinton would never understand. He set out to win a war. He said, “we must defend the Union.” Why? You can’t fight against slavery, unless you create the instrument that destroys slavery. You must destroy slavery on the continent. How do you do that? By crushing the institution which represents slavery, and establishing the institution which prohibits it. And that great amendment, which is the Lincoln amendment to the Constitution, exemplifies this policy. You can not win a war without a victory. To win a victory, you must create an institution, an army. You must win the victory and institutionalize the victory. That’s how you make reforms. And, Lincoln understood that.

So, what did we do? What we did, was what we knew. What we did, is, we mobilized to win total war, as Lazare Carnot had done. The trouble was finding some honest generals to fight the war. Lincoln launched—what? Lazare Carnot’s machine tool design principle: we introduced machine tool design industry and machine tool design methods, to effect, through science, which was largely French and German science, a revolution in technology. The war was not won by the soldiers, though they played their part. The war was not won by the generals, though Grant, and especially Sherman were geniuses. And Sheridan wasn’t so bad.

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The Union Army’s industrial logistics-in-depth gave it an advantage over the Confederacy. Here, the Gen. J.C. Robinson of the U.S. Military Railroad, in the build-up to the siege of Petersburg, Virginia in 1865.

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The war was won in industry. The war was won in logistics, and science, and technology. The war was won by creating an instrument, a United States as a powerful, armed economy, which could destroy the enemy. The Confederacy was doomed not because we had better generals, though in the end we did. The Confederacy was doomed, because the United States was a superior armed agency, determined to win a war against an inferior, immoral, degenerate institution, the Confederacy.

And so, from this, with protectionist methods and repeal of the free market, and with a president who was prepared to make war on Britain, and invade Canada, and so forth, if necessary, we established a really serious economy on this continent. And every nation on this planet, which was serious about serious economy, had no choice but to turn to the American System for that.

A Creeping Treason After Lincoln’s Assassination

Now, after that, as a result of the creeping in of treason, particularly after the Tilden-Hayes scandal, things of that sort, which are a whole subject in themselves, London got a dominant role. Through the Specie Resumption Act by a corrupt Congress, an act was passed, which destroyed the sovereignty of the United States in respect to its own currency. And, through that, the London forces, and their agents inside the United States, grabbed control of the financial apparatus of the United States, and took control of industry, through finance. The fight between Wall Street and Ford, merely typifies what this struggle was about.

So, we begot a dual system of financier oligarchy on top, especially after Teddy Roosevelt became president. But that’s what Grover Cleveland already represented. And, national economy underneath.

As long as we were threatened with a war, and as long as the military still had people like MacArthur in it, people who were Civil War generals, like President McKinley, a Civil War officer of that tradition; as long as the Civil War fighters remained in control, until Teddy Roosevelt took over, we had a patriotic tradition deep in our military and other institutions. Though they tried to destroy our military. At one point, the U.S. Army was so poor, the Congress wouldn’t give money for it, the officers of the U.S. Army reached into their own pockets to pay the enlisted men, because there was no pay for the enlisted men allowed by Congress, as a part of the British effort and a corrupt Congress, to destroy the U.S. military.

President Franklin Roosevelt applied Lincoln’s model of national mobilization to ensure victory in World War II. Here he is on an inspection tour of the U.S. Navy’s Bolling Air Base, in 1940.

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So we built. We had these institutions, we had the MacArthurs. And every time we would get into a war, or a threat of a war, we would say we have to have a mobilization. Our mobilization was always modelled upon the Lincoln mobilization. We made revolutions; in World War I, for a short period of time, we made a revolution. Roosevelt, as Undersecretary of the Navy at that time, Franklin Roosevelt, learned that lesson. Roosevelt applied that lesson when he was president, for the mobilization of the United States. We still had that, even under the time that the British got us into this crazy thing with the Soviet Union, we had to mobilize. And, there was still an attempt to mobilize, in a serious way, in the American tradition, strategically. Industry was mobilized. Contracts were given out. Technology spewed forth. We went into an aerospace program. Technology spewed forth.

Then, suddenly, after the [Cuban] Missile Crisis and the killing of President John Kennedy, and the deal between the United States, the McGeorge Bundys and the Brits and the Khrushchovs, they said “we’re not going to have a big war any more. So we can get rid of this industry.” They used that to create a shock, hit upon the Baby Boomers, with known techniques, and brainwashed a whole generation, particularly the campus students, between 1964 and ’72, and laid the seeds, that when this generation of Baby Boomers from the ’64 to ’72 period would come into the top positions in government, in professions, and in industry, education, that the nation would be destroyed by the Baby Boomers. And, that’s what’s happening to us.

And that’s the way you have to understand this. These are the principles. These are the issues. This is the way history works, at least this aspect of history. And, only by understanding this, and applying the principles, in reverse, understanding the reverse implications of how the enemy did us in, can we get the country back. The shock which we’re about to be administered; you’ve seen a shock already. That was only the pre-shock. That’s about four point something on the Richter Scale. Wait for 7, a couple of weeks from now.

RE-CREATING THE REPUBLIC

How Abraham Lincoln Organized Victory for the Union

by H. Graham Lowry

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in EIR Vol. 30, No. 33, August 29, 2003, pp. 20-30.

Virginia Tourism Corporation

When President Lincoln learned that the Union Army had taken possession of the Confederate capital, he exclaimed, “Thank God, that I have lived to see this!” Although the area was still dangerous, Lincoln insisted on visiting Richmond—not as a conqueror, but to heal the wounds of war and reunite the nation. Shown here is the statue in Richmond, commemorating Lincoln’ s visit to the city in April 1865, with his son Tad. The statue was unveiled in April 2003.

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Historian Graham Lowry, a longtime associate of Lyndon LaRouche, and author of How the Nation Was Won: America’s Untold Story, Volume I, 1630-1754, died on July 28, 2003. During that year, despite worsening illness, he gave several classes to regional offices of the LaRouche movement, on his ongoing research on Abraham Lincoln. He was particularly eager to impart to the burgeoning LaRouche Youth Movement, the real history of their nation—the history that they are not taught in schools, where they learn that the Founding Fathers were slaveholders, and Lincoln was a racist who only wanted to save the Union and didn’t really care about abolishing slavery. The following article, which was edited by his wife, Pamela, draws from classes he gave in Arlington, Virginia; New York City; and Baltimore, Maryland, as well as from notes for an article he had intended to write. This article was first published in EIR on August 29, 2003. Embedded links have been added.

The United States in 1860 was on the brink of total destruction. Abraham Lincoln knew it; a handful of other patriots knew it on one level or another; and the plotters seeking to overthrow the government were becoming bolder every day. What was the threat to the constitutional republic in 1860? Secession? The spread of slavery? Civil war? These dangers by then had been broadly recognized—even openly promoted by leading Southerners. But these were secondary aspects of a planned coup d’état to bring the constitutional republic of the United States to an end. Abraham Lincoln dared to shoulder the unique responsibility for simultaneously defending the republic from its enemies and creating the conditions for a lasting peace. As he said in his Cooper Union address in 1860:

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.

Who was this Lincoln, this ugly duckling who told rollicking frontier tales and wrote in the beautiful language of the English Renaissance?

The Mind of Abraham Lincoln

Now, what I am going to try to do, is to enable you to actually exist within the mind of Abraham Lincoln, for a while, and, of course, if you keep working on it, you can keep doing it for a long time. Not merely is Lincoln one of the most significant examples of the leadership principle in the American historical tradition; but he is that, anywhere in world history.

In a crisis such as this nation and the world face today, the advantage that you have, is that you can turn to a model of the leadership principle, in the sense that I’m going to demonstrate with Lincoln. And you will find that all kinds of, say, lieutenants; and rank and file, good citizens, and so forth, whose efforts on behalf of keeping something called “human,” something worthwhile about human life going forward, do it through their grandchildren, either literally or figuratively. We have the responsibility now to ensure the future of those children two generations into the future. You don’t wait around and see if they can work it out when they’re 20 years old, because by that time there may not be a future.

That’s what makes you human: that you take the responsibility to extend the efforts that people made before you, and you start projecting them forward, and working to ensure them for another good span of time to come. And then, you find that these historical people are with you, not in some mumbo-jumbo sense, but in the sense that they will be resources that you can bring back into the war, that will live again through you, and that you’ll be stronger because of them. And then people will recognize: “Wait a minute, there’s something different about this person. This person represents something I can trust, and something that I will follow.”

And that is what people did see in Lincoln; it took a while for him to develop it, but when he did, it was unmistakable. It’s why we defeated the British-inspired slave empire called the Confederacy, and kept it from destroying the only republic in the history of the world, a Constitutional Republic, that had as its principle, the sacred creative potential of each individual citizen. I’m sure you’ve read something about the principle of the general welfare, the good of the whole society, and that the only purpose of government is to ensure that for the present and the future as well. If you have a government that starts saying, “Who can we go kill tomorrow? Let’s find someplace where we don’t like the way the people look, or the color of their skin, and then we’ll bomb ’em! Torch ’em! Imprison ’em! Create dictatorships, create an empire.” That’s not the United States of America; that is not our mission in history.

And the people who’ve known what the mission was, have been the people who have come to the fore, when it was threatened. Lincoln had to do it. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to do it, and Lyndon LaRouche has had to do it his whole life. And now, the enemies of the republic are at the end of their strength, and if we act in the right way now, they’re going to lose. The question is, do we all go down with them, or do we save something we would call a human future, in contrast to this barbaric dark age that will be the only thing to follow, without us?

The Wellsprings of Inspiration

Let me give you a sense of three things about Lincoln: the sources of his own inspiration, in this American Intellectual Tradition, as we call it; his personal sense of mission; and then one of the best kept secrets, which is that he personally organized the Union Army to win the Civil War.

First, to find out about what inspired him, we must travel back to the year 1838. It was then that he made an address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois on the subject of “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” Much had happened since those political institutions were founded in the wake of the American Revolution. Our inveterate enemy, the British Empire, hadn’t waited long to try to reconquer the United States. In the course of the War of 1812 they burned the White House and the Capitol, hurled their Indian allies against the American frontiers, and tried to conquer New Orleans as a way of controlling the Mississippi and stopping any further westward settlement by Americans.

Without the Americans setting up agriculture and industry in the western lands, the British would be free to expand the basis for a slave empire that would include the American South and Southwest, Mexico, and on down through Central America and beyond. This scheme would remain British policy through the Civil War and furnished much of the motivating force behind the development of the Confederacy. It had also been a factor in the Nullification crisis in the early 1830s, when arch-slave-state South Carolina attempted to nullify the Constitution of the United States.

Despite early and very successful efforts, such as the Erie Canal, to develop American infrastructure, the Presidents after John Quincy Adams, such as Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren, traitorously blocked internal improvements. In 1837, America suffered a manipulated financial panic, which led to a serious depression and, in some cities and towns, mob violence.

“Washington Crossing the Delaware,” by Emanuel Leutze. From boyhood, Lincoln was inspired by Washington, as he told citizens at Trenton, New Jersey in 1861. “I recollect thinking, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for.”

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Lincoln was worried that the living memory of the American Revolution, which had sustained so many Americans, was almost gone, and that the new generation was unprepared to face the mounting threats. In his 1838 speech, he asked:

At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

The danger is, he says, that the Revolutionary War generation is almost gone, and the memories of that struggle

cannot be so universally known, and so vividly felt,” as they were by the generation just gone to rest. At the close of that struggle, nearly every adult male had been a participator in some of its scenes. The consequence was, that of those scenes—in the form of a husband, a father, a son, or a brother—a living history was to be found in every family.... But those histories are gone. They can be read no more, forever. They were a fortress of strength; but what invading foemen could never do, the silent artillery of time has done, the leveling of its walls. They are gone.

The challenge he then puts forth to this audience is that they have to re-create, themselves, the props to sustain these institutions and these higher principles for which so many gave their lives. He says,

Let those [materials] be moulded into general intelligence, [sound] morality, and in particular, a reverence for the Constitution and laws;...

Upon [these] let the proud fabric of freedom rest, as the rock of its basis; and as truly as has been said of the only greater institution, “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

Years later, on his way to his inauguration as President in 1861, Lincoln stopped to address the New Jersey Legislature at Trenton, a city which held special meaning for him. He told them:

In the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book, such a one as few of the younger members have ever seen, Weem’s Life of Washington. I remember all the accounts there given of the battle fields and struggles for the liberties of the country, and none fixed themselves upon my imagination so deeply as the struggle here at Trenton, New Jersey. The crossing of the river; the contest with the Hessians; the great hardships endured at that time, all fixed themselves on my memory more than any single revolutionary event....

I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for. I am exceedingly anxious that that thing which they struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come; I am exceedingly anxious that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle. [Box: Lincoln on Slavery: The Dred Scott Decision]

Photograph by Alexander Gardner

Lincoln with his Army at Antietam on Oct. 3, 1862 (Gen. George B. McClellan is the young braggart facing off against him). The battle was one of the bloodiest of the war, in which General Lee’s advance into Maryland was thrown back, but McClellan allowed the Confederates to escape across the Potomac into Virginia, ignoring Lincoln’ s explicit orders. The battered soldiers were heartened by the personal concern shown them by the President; they said he looked “serious and careworn,” and their hearts went out to him. For the first time, they began to refer to him as “Father Abraham.”

Photograph by Timothy H. O’Sullivan

In May 1864, some 4,300 supply wagons followed the Union Army as it moved south to The Wilderness battlefield in Virginia. Creating the massive infrastructure required to sustain the troops, who were fighting deep in enemy country, was one of the colossal achievements that made victory possible.

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What Lincoln liked most about George Washington was that Washington would do the impossible. When it looked like the Continental Army was totally lost, had no chance at all, he said, “What don’t they think we can do? We’ll go do it.” And that was how we attacked Trenton on Christmas Day, coming across the icy Delaware in shallow-draft boats, and surprising the whole drunken Hessian mercenary encampment. Then, Washington withdrew silently at night from right in front of a large British Army come to trap him and captured Princeton. At the beginning of the campaign, the British held all of New Jersey, but after two such battles, they withdrew from the entire state into the “safety” of disease-infested New York City! Lincoln knew that Washington was someone to emulate and trust.

Lincoln’s Sense of Mission

Leaving Springfield, Illinois in February 1861 for his inauguration, Lincoln said:

I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him, I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail. Trusting in Him, who can go with me, and remain with you, and be everywhere for good, let us confidently hope that all will yet be well.

President James Buchanan, Lincoln’ s predecessor, had fallen in with British plans for extending slavery throughout the Americas. A coup d’etat was under way in Washington, even as Lincoln arrived for his inauguration in 1861.

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Yet even as he boarded the train, American intelligence agents were discovering a wide-ranging plot to assassinate him and take over the government. Since Lincoln’s 1838 speech, an even more outrageous group of traitors had occupied the Presidential office, culminating in James Buchanan. Buchanan had been a very limp-wristed minister to the Court of St. James, and had fallen right in with the British plans for a slave empire by signing the Ostend Manifesto, which called for the occupation of Cuba and the extension of slavery. [Box: On the Declaration of Independence]

Once the slave-holding states saw that Lincoln had been elected, they started to secede, but President Buchanan made no attempt to keep them from seizing all the Federal property they could get their hands on, including arsenals, forts, Navy yards and ships, and Federal buildings of all descriptions. Not content with that, Buchanan’s Cabinet members openly spoke of how to keep Lincoln from being inaugurated, while the official government newspaper, subsidized by the Administration, called for the “insulted” slave owners to secede!

Buchanan’s message to Congress on Dec. 3, 1860, presented a government in willful paralysis. Secession, he said, was unconstitutional, but there was no power in Congress or the Executive to compel a state to remain in the Union. It was the duty of the President to enforce the laws, but in the existing situation in South Carolina it was utterly impossible for him to do so. “The fact is,” Buchanan wrote, “that our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war.”

Even worse, Buchanan had just finished hosting an “unofficial” visit by the British Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, and his large party of lordly advisors. These British peers met with secessionist leaders as Edward made a triumphal tour of the South, and stayed not only for the American Presidential Election, but tarried on and on, supposedly while their ship underwent repairs, in order to monitor the various plans for a coup d’état. Buchanan added insult to injury by taking the British nest of vipers to visit George Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon.

When Lincoln’s inaugural train reached Philadelphia, he was told of the assassination plot against him in Baltimore, where European Mazzinians had combined with Secessionists to plan an attack as he rode through the city. Yet in his speech at Independence Hall the next day, Lincoln did not waver:

I have often inquired of myself, what great principle or idea it was that kept this Confederacy [union of states—ed.] so long together. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the mother land; but something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that, in due time, the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance. This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But, if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.

Now, this is someone you can look at and say, “I think this man means what he says. I think we’d better follow him, because nobody else has a clue about what we are going to do.”

The situation was indeed dire—almost the entire South was seceding in open declaration of war against the United States, armed to the teeth, bankrolled to the maximum that the coffers would bear, by Britain. If you ever get a chance to tour West Point, go to what they call Trophy Point, overlooking that wide expanse of the Hudson, and there you may see a row of gleaming cannons from the Civil War, and on every single one of them is stamped “Made in Birmingham” or “Made in Manchester.” They’re all British-made cannons, that were captured from the Confederates during Union victories.

Lincoln talked about his mission, and the mission of the nation, in his address to Congress on December 1, 1862. He said,

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power, and bear the responsibility.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

Lincoln and the Army

Lincoln has some problems to solve in dealing with the American population. He has to establish an understanding in the people, that when you are fighting to preserve the union, you are fighting for yourself; you’re fighting so that you may have a future. Secondly, Lincoln has to somehow, personally, organize the Union Army. And he has to organize the people and the Army in such a way, that they are able to understand that he is the personal, living embodiment of everything that they cherish, or should cherish, and could come to cherish, about this country, about this human purpose.

Now, as long as he is travelling through the country on his way to the inauguration, he is able to speak to thousands of people about what they must do. At Indianapolis, he says:

To the salvation of this Union there needs but one single thing—the hearts of a people like yours. When the people rise in masses in behalf of the Union and the liberties of their country, truly may it be said, “The gates of hell shall not prevail against them.”

In all the trying positions in which I shall be placed—and doubtless I shall be placed in many trying ones—my reliance will be placed upon you and the people of the United States—and I wish you to remember now and forever, that it is your business, and not mine; that if the union of these States, and the liberties of this people, shall be lost, it is but little to any one man of 52 years of age, but a great deal to the 30 millions of people who inhabit these United States, and to their posterity in all coming time....

I, as already intimated, am but an accidental instrument, temporary, and to serve but for a limited time, but I appeal to you again to constantly bear in mind that with you, and not with politicians, not with Presidents, not with office-seekers, but with you, is the question, “Shall the Union and shall the liberties of this country be preserved to the latest generation?”

But once in Washington, and under war conditions, Lincoln rarely spoke to large audiences. But there was a way to organize the Army, and, through them, the civilians as well. How? Well, every Army unit that was not meant for the western theater of operations reported to Washington, D.C. to be trained. Lincoln made sure that he greeted every unit as it paraded by the White House, and sometimes he was able to speak at length with them. The White House itself was open to all, and many a soldier sat himself down in a chair or at a desk and wrote a letter home. Civilians, too, flocked to talk to the President, whether asking for a job or a pardon for a deserter. Often, Lincoln would delay talking to his Cabinet in order to speak to the citizens who flooded his office.

Sometimes, the President would become impatient when a new unit was scheduled to arrive by boat up the Potomac, and he would commandeer a vessel to go and meet them before they would even land. By the end of June in 1861, Lincoln had already been seen by tens of thousands of arriving soldiers in the Union Army. Many of them were young—born in the 1840s—and had had precious little to value about their government leaders. The enlisted soldiers called themselves “the boys,” and their officers were “the men.” Lincoln did more than just talk about the Union cause: He promoted the hospitals and medical care they would need, visited them in their encampments, and came to see them after their battles. He also went out of his way to include [in the Army] as many elements of society as possible, including the foreign-born and men from the slave states. He also stretched or cut red tape in order to form an army as soon as possible; perhaps even to convince the Confederates to turn from their course. “We are in no condition to waste time on technicalities. The enthusiastic uprising of the people in our cause, is our great reliance; and we cannot safely give it any check, even though it overflows and runs in channels not laid down in any chart.”

After the terrible Union defeat at Bull Run on July 21, 1861, when the picnicking Congressmen who had come to watch the battle turned tail and fled back to Washington, Lincoln got in a carriage and went from camp to camp, making short speeches of gratitude and hope. A Wisconsin soldier, Robert Beecham, wrote home:

There was stamped on his face a fresh, vigorous, healthy, and courageous look that inspired confidence. We certainly needed some encouragement. It was good to be impressed with the fact that the President on whose shoulders rested this mighty burden of war, with its vast train of results, either for weal or for woe to the people of a hemisphere, was not discouraged with the outlook.

Beecham dubbed Secretary Seward’s platitudinous speech as “Taffy,” but when Lincoln spoke, “he only said in a mild, gentle way, that he had confidence in the ability and patriotism of the American people and their volunteer army to meet and overcome every enemy of the republic.”

When Lincoln stopped speaking, the soldiers rushed his carriage, each one wanting to shake his hand. Beecham tried to reach him, but finally gave up. “I felt like shaking hands with Mr. Lincoln myself,” he wrote, “but on second thought it seemed best not to assist in wearing the poor man’s life out.”

National Archives

Gen. George McClellan, the “Little Napoleon.”

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The Commander-in-Chief Takes Norfolk

Gen. George McClellan, the commander of the Union forces at the beginning of the war, was an excellent drillmaster for the troops, but he seemed almost completely incapable of moving those troops in the direction of the enemy. He finally floated the Army of the Potomac down to the Peninsula of Virginia, but there he sat, immoveable, while he demanded 100,000 more men, and then another 100,000. His dispatches to Lincoln complained constantly about the weather, the mud, the overpowering numbers of the Confederate Army, and his manpower weakness.

At first, Lincoln tried humor. He said that McClellan was an admirable engineer, “but he seems to have a special talent for the stationary engine.” One day, someone called on Lincoln and stated that he had a family problem. His sick relative lived in Richmond, and he asked for a pass that would take him behind the enemy lines. Lincoln asked, “Are you going to really use the pass?” “Of course, Mr. President.” “Because I gave George McClellan 125,000 ‘passes’ to Richmond and he still hasn’t used them.” Finally, Lincoln sent General McClellan a note saying, “My dear McClellan, if you don’t want to use the Army, I should like to borrow it for a while.”

At this time, Lincoln had no replacement for McClellan, so he didn’t want to fire him. One day in 1862, Senator Wade from Ohio came to the White House and demanded that Lincoln immediately fire General McClellan. Lincoln answered, “Senator, who would you put in McClellan’s place?” “Anybody,” snorted Wade. “Wade,” replied Lincoln, “anybody will do for you, but I must have somebody.” It was at this time that Lincoln started to borrow books on military theory from the Library of Congress. He also began an almost daily inspection of new weapons systems, and he was especially interested in the design and construction of the Union ironclad, the Monitor.

In May 1862, with McClellan still sitting on the Peninsula and making no move toward Richmond, Lincoln took Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase with him down to Hampton Roads, Virginia. McClellan sent word that he was “too busy” to see his Commander-in-Chief, so Lincoln inspected the Monitor and decided to embark on a campaign of his own—to the delight of the soldiers and sailors. Although Fort Monroe had been successfully held for the Union by Gen. John Wool, and the Union Navy filled Hampton Roads with ships, the Confederates still held the town and Navy yard of Norfolk.

Since the famous battle two months before between the Monitor and the Confederate ironclad Merrimac, the Merrimac had been lurking at Norfolk, threatening the Union ships. Lincoln proposed that the Navy ferry a contingent of Union troops over to Norfolk in order to capture the town. Naval officers protested, however, that the shallow water would not allow them to get within a mile of the shore.

Lincoln, who in his youth had twice helped steer a flatboat down the treacherous Mississippi from Illinois to New Orleans, carefully studied a map of Hampton Roads. He consulted with General Wool, a 78-year-old veteran of the War of 1812 who was still full of fight, and he approved the plan. So on the night of May 10, Lincoln and two Cabinet secretaries pulled away for Norfolk in a small boat to the spot that Lincoln had chosen. The water, indeed, was deep enough, and Lincoln jumped ashore and took a walk on enemy territory. Lincoln reported his findings, and General Wool’s troops went ashore the next day only to find that the Confederates had gotten wind of Lincoln’s maneuver and had abandoned the city! All they saw was the Mayor of Norfolk walking toward them holding out the keys to the city. Left without a base, the crew of the dreaded Merrimac blew her up and fled.

“So ended a brilliant week’s campaign by the President,” recorded Chase, “for I think it quite certain that if he had not gone down, Norfolk would still have been in the possession of the enemy, and the Merrimac as grim and defiant as ever.”

The headlines in the New York newspapers hailed “President Lincoln’s First Military and Naval Operation—Its Great Success.”

The episode was not a major victory, but it made a considerable impression on the men at Fort Monroe. A soldier wrote of seeing “Mr. Lincoln driving past to take possession of Norfolk.” “It is extremely fortunate that the President came down as he did,” wrote an officer of the Monitor that day; “he seems to have infused new life into everything.” In what had been a scene of inactivity, he saw Lincoln “stirring up the dry bones.”

Still unable to see the incredibly busy General McClellan, Private Lincoln boarded a steamer up the Chesapeake, standing on the deck with his hat off, bowing to the cheering sailors on the Monitor and the other Navy vessels that he passed.

Nine days later, Lincoln quietly signed the Homestead Act into law. Vetoed by President Buchanan in 1860, the law provided for the transfer of 160 acres of unoccupied public land to each homesteader for a nominal fee if he and his family lived there and worked the land for five years. Even while the Civil War continued to rage, thousands of pioneers were flooding west across the Mississippi, fulfilling Lincoln’s vision for the peace which was to come.

Photograph by Alexander Gardner

Lincoln and McClellan at Antietam on Oct. 3, 1862. McClellan was relieved of command shortly thereafter, and became, in 1864, the Democratic Party candidate for President, running on a platform of “peace”: Let the South go, let slavery continue.

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‘We’re Coming, Father Abraham’

General McClellan eventually moved the Army to Maryland, where one of the bloodiest battles of the war was fought at Antietam Creek, on September 17, 1862. Confederate commander Gen. Robert E. Lee had moved his Army into Maryland, and McClellan had fortuitously captured his plans, but McClellan threw away his advantage by poor planning, and turned the battle into a bloodbath by insisting on sending wave after wave of Union troops over a narrow bridge, with Confederate cannons before them and Confederate sharpshooters above them. Lee and his men escaped across the Potomac, because McClellan ignored Lincoln’s orders to pursue and cut off the Potomac crossings. If this had been done, Lee’s Army could well have surrendered en masse.

Lincoln was bitter about the unnecessary bloodshed, and he was furious when he received information about a court martial being conducted of a certain Maj. John Key. Asked why McClellan did not go after Lee and crush him, Key had replied, “That is not the game.” Instead, he said, the intent in the Army was merely “that neither army shall get much advantage of the other; that both shall be kept in the field till they are exhausted, when we will make a compromise and save slavery.”

Lincoln insisted on questioning the man himself, and the officer repeated the same viewpoint to the President. “If there was a ‘game’ ever among Union men, to have our Army not take an advantage of the enemy when it could,” Lincoln said, then he was going “to break up that game.” He determined to go once more to the Army in person. Lincoln counted those present for duty at over 88,000, even after the recent losses, but there they sat on the fields around McClellan’s tent. That night he climbed a ridge with his friend Ozias Hatch, and asked Hatch what he saw. “The Army of the Potomac,” he replied, but Lincoln retorted, “So it is called, but that is a mistake; it is only McClellan’s bodyguard.”

McClellan scheduled a review of the troops for October 3. “Mr. Lincoln was manifestly touched,” observed an officer in the 6th Wisconsin, “and he, himself, looked serious and careworn.” Lincoln kept bowing low in response to the salutes from the ragged banners, but some of the soldiers felt their hearts going out to him, instead. “How the smile from a care-worn and anxious face touched the hearts of those bronzed, rough-looking men,” wrote another. Almost every soldier who kept a diary or wrote a letter home after the review made some mention of his own sight of the President. One soldier of the newly dubbed Iron Brigade of Wisconsin said, “Altogether he is the man to suit the soldiers.” And now, for the first time, the soldiers begin to refer to Lincoln as “Father Abraham.”

When Lincoln arrived in Gettysburg the night before he delivered his immortal address, throngs of soldiers and citizens filled the streets singing, “We Are Coming, Father Abraham” until 1:00 in the morning. In 1864, General McClellan, now relieved of command, was to be the Democratic candidate for the Presidency against Lincoln. Lincoln was, as the soldiers had written, very “care-worn,” but he had to run again. Henry Wing was a young reporter for the New York Tribune who covered the war at the front, and whenever he returned to Washington, Lincoln wanted him to come see him and “tell me all you hear and see.” On one of these visits before the 1864 election, Lincoln said,

There’s many a night, Henry, that I plan to resign. I wouldn’t run again now if I didn’t know these other fellows couldn’t save the Union on their platforms, whatever they say. I can’t quit, Henry. I have to stay.

In August of that election year, Lincoln addressed the 166th Ohio Infantry Regiment when it returned from the front:

It is not merely for today, but for all time to come that we should perpetuate for our children’s children this great and free government, which we have enjoyed all our lives. I beg you to remember this, not merely for my sake, but for yours. I happen temporarily to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each of you may have, through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained, that we may not lose our birthright—not only for one, but for two or three years. The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.

There was jubilation over Lincoln’s defeat of McClellan in the 1864 election. The Army had voted for Lincoln by an overwhelming margin of better than two to one. Now, among the soldiers, he was almost universally referred to as “Father Abraham.” But, there was also another note. The men saw in the President’s victory what a Pennsylvania artilleryman regarded as an assurance that “the sacrifices that the soldier has made, have not been in vain, and that the war will continue until the parties who brought our present National troubles upon us, will be compelled to submit to the law and the cause of our troubles removed forever.” And not for the first time, the soldiers compared Lincoln to another President. “Future history will place Mr. Lincoln’s name next to Washington,” a Pennsylvania volunteer said two weeks after the election. “The first the founder, the second the preserver of our country.”

Public Domain/Harper’s Weekly

Lincoln entering Richmond, April 4, 1865. He was surrounded by huge, jubilant crowds of freed slaves. “My poor friends,” he told them, “you are free—free as air. You can cast off the name of slave and trample upon it; it will come to you no more.”

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Richmond, At Last

In late March 1865, Lincoln steamed down to Fort Monroe and then up the James River to his Army’s headquarters at City Point. He wanted to spend all of the final days of the war with the Army. Then news came that Lee had marched out of Richmond, and Union Gen. Godfrey Weitzel was marching in to take possession of the Confederate capital. “Thank God,” said Lincoln, fervently, “that I have lived to see this! It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone. I want to see Richmond.”

Adm. David Porter, a supporter of Gen. McClellan and not a warm friend of the President, wrote an account of Lincoln’s journey. Lincoln was warned that there might still be Confederate troops or sharpshooters in the area; there were fires still burning, and no one knew exactly what the situation in the city was. But he was adamant, and after the channel was cleared of torpedoes, a flotilla of boats set off up the James River. All were jockeying in order to be the first one into the city, but all were grounded one after the other. Adm. Porter took Lincoln and his young son Tad onto his barge and, with a small number of marines, they beat everyone to the city.

As Lincoln stepped onto land, holding the hand of his son, a small group of Negroes digging with spades recognized him from a picture which they had kept for four years. They fell on their knees before him, but Lincoln, embarrassed, said,

Don’t kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy. I am but God’s humble instrument; but you may rest assured that as long as I live no one shall put a shackle to your limbs and you shall have all the rights which God has given to every other free citizen of this Republic.

Porter said that as Lincoln said this, although he was not a handsome man, and ungainly in his person, “yet in his enthusiasm he seemed the personification of manly beauty.” Porter realized they had to move on, and asked the patriarch of the group to withdraw and let them pass. The now ex-slaves joined hands in a circle and sang a hymn, and as they did so, the formerly deserted streets were now filled with ex-slaves, all joyously trying to get a glimpse of Lincoln.

Porter reported that the crowd could not be made to understand that they were detaining the President, for “they looked upon him as belonging to them, and that he had come to put the crowning act to the great work he had commenced. They would not feel that they were free in reality until they heard it from his own lips.”

Lincoln spoke again:

My poor friends, you are free—free as air. You can cast off the name of slave and trample upon it; it will come to you no more. Liberty is your birthright. God gave it to you as he gave it to others, and it is a sin that you have been deprived of it for so many years. But you must try to deserve this priceless boon.

This was the same thing he had told those young men in Springfield, 27 years before:

Let the world see that you merit it, and are able to maintain it by your good works. Don’t let your joy carry you into excesses. Learn the laws and obey them; obey God’s commandments and thank him for giving you liberty, for to him you owe all things. There, now, let me pass on; I have but little time to spare. I want to see the capital, and must return at once to Washington to secure to you that liberty which you seem to prize so highly....

Winning the Political Fight Today

If you think of the way that Lincoln set out, you see that he defines the problem in the only way you can define it: We’re not trying to defeat the enemy because they’re evil. I have to do this because the posterity of all time to come depends on it. Everyone who has gotten us this far—the Founding Fathers, the Nathaniel Greenes, the Robert Fultons, you name them, the Daniel Boones, the Benjamin Franklins, every one of them, if we do not win, we will effectively deny their existence; we take away their posterity.

Whether you know it or not, you are already part of a mission to do the greatest good, perpetuate the greatest good that’s ever been done in the history of the human race. If that statement is too big for you, then you do have to study more American history, and you’ll see that it’s true. That is an ironclad truth. And the way you get at it is not to find out the whos and whats and the years, and the these and the those and the thems. You have to start to say, “Wait a minute, I can get inside the mind of this person; I can re-experience how they solved a problem.” What makes you human is the ability to re-create in your own mind, the greatest creative output of the greatest minds in any period of history. What you find is happening, is that these people become so familiar to you that they are your friends! You’ve got ’em. They’re there to rely on.

Then when you read something by Lincoln, you don’t just say, “Those are nice words. What a great idea. Nice poetry!” No, you start to look at his mind and say, “Look what this man pulled in, in terms of the significance of his life, and carried it to the limit of anything you could imagine.” But to him, that is what he was; that was who he was; normal; that was human. That was his mission; his mission was to become a true human being.

So Lincoln typifies, at the highest level, somebody who could get this through to other people; so that he created, or he improved, a lot of really wonderful people. There are a lot of other friends out there, waiting. You’ve got to bring them back into the war. And if we get them back into the war, the way Lincoln did—and we won the Civil War because Lincoln did that—then we will win this war too. There’s no other way to do it.

Lincoln on Slavery:

The Dred Scott Decision

In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court passed its infamous Dred Scott decision, allowing a slaveholder to cross state lines, into a free state, to reclaim his “property”—a former slave who had gained his freedom. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote in his opinion on the case, that the Declaration of Independence did not apply to the Negroes, who “had no rights that the white man was bound to respect.”

Lincoln, in a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1857, had this to say on the matter:

In those days [of the American Revolution], our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distance places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is. [back to text]

On the Declaration of Independence

Lincoln’s speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 26, 1956, addressed the intent of the Founding Fathers, in including in the Declaration of Independence the phrase, “all men are created equal”:

They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiarity to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all peoples of all colors everywhere. The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use. Its authors meant it to be—thank God, it is now proving itself—a stumbling block to those who in after times might seek to turn a free people back into the hateful paths of despotism. They knew the proneness of prosperity to breed tyrants, and they meant when such should re-appear in this fair land and commence their vocation, they should find left for them at least one hard nut to crack. [back to text]

III. How History Is Made in the Individual Mind

Colonizing Mars: The Future of Man in Space—Three Views

Includes unpublished Wernher Von Braun-Krafft Ehricke correspondence

by Marsha Freeman, EIR Technology Editor

NASA

It is estimated that 25 million people—undoubtedly many of them children—watched Wernher von Braun explain how rockets work, and how we will get to the Moon and Mars. Here von Braun (right) and Walt Disney in the TV studio in 1954.

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Aug. 30—At the present moment, there are three spacecraft on their way to Mars. They will arrive at their common destination next February, each having a specific mission assignment. The United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter is to track changes in the atmosphere, to function as a weather station for the planet.

China’s mission is a first-ever attempt to deploy an orbiter, lander, and rover on China’s very first mission to the red planet. It is a technology demonstration.

And NASA’s Perseverance rover will collect high-resolution data. Perseverance is also carrying the four-pound Ingenuity helicopter. Most important, the rover will collect soil samples that will be brought to Earth in a joint sample return mission with Europe, tentatively set to launch in 2026.

The ultimate goal of all of the robotic missions to Mars is to prepare for a manned mission and eventual colonization. There have been many manned Mars missions planned, but never yet executed because of false notions of the impact of Federal spending. Below are examples of three different approaches, from Wernher von Braun, Krafft Ehricke, and Lyndon LaRouche.

Wernher von Braun’s The Mars Project

In 1948, German scientists and engineers who had created mankind’s first rocket to reach the boundary of space at the Army Research station at Peenemünde during World War II, were at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, teaching U. S. Army personnel how to launch the A-4 (V-2) rockets brought to the U.S. as the war was ending. This was hardly challenging to the Germans. Having lots of free time, they sought to learn English, with about 100 men sharing one dictionary, and trips into town to watch cowboy movies.

Wernher von Braun, who led the rocket research program at Peenemünde, and Krafft Ehricke, a visionary who “lived in the future,” and was drafted to work on the Army rocket research project at Peenemünde, shared the ability to describe a project in great detail, while always keeping in mind the overall purpose of the endeavor. And they were both passionate about space exploration. But they had distinctly different approaches, seen in their published works, and in personal letters (see below). People asked, “Why are you planning on going to Mars? We have not yet gone to the Moon.” Perhaps the reason was that Hermann Oberth in his 1929 book, Ways to Space Flight, had already worked that out. And they all saw how it would be done in Fritz Lang’s 1929 film, The Woman in the Moon, for which Oberth was the technical adviser.

Von Braun, without whom it is doubtful that there would have been a successful Saturn V rocket, or Apollo trips to the Moon, was a conservative engineer, who felt comfortable advancing technology in small steps. For example, von Braun had a negative view of using nuclear power for propulsion, and instead continued to use the fossil fuels with which the “rocket team” was already familiar. His approach was to try to convince policy makers and the public that the Mars mission could be done in a relatively short time without any breakthroughs in science or revolutionary advances in technology. In a letter to a colleague in 1950, von Braun wrote that the project was developed in the following manner:

The whole thing is a futuristic novel, based on solid technical facts. I have consciously avoided utilizing any fantastic assumptions that today could not be asserted with certainty (for example, nuclear propulsion). I have instead projected into the future technology which now exists, and is well-known…. The result is an expedition to Mars and back for 70 people…. And not once did I introduce liquid hydrogen, for which I don’t have much use, as many authors do.

The remark about liquid hydrogen is a friendly jab at Krafft Ehricke, who later was known as “the father of the Centaur,” the world’s first liquid hydrogen rocket.

Von Braun’s 1948 book,The Mars Project, went unpublished for nearly 60 years. Apogee Books in Canada brought it out under the title, Project Mars, in 2006.

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Von Braun’s Mars expedition consists of a flotilla of 10 space vehicles to be “manned by not less than 70 men,” and assembled at an Earth-orbital space station. Von Braun’s “neighbor” at Fort Bliss, Krafft Ehricke, suggested to von Braun that only three of the [ten] vessels be equipped with “landing boats” for descent to Mars’ surface. This would make the mission less complex, and more affordable.

Considering the optimistic content of the story, it is not surprising that no one would publish the novel. The science fiction being offered to the American public in the 1940s was characterized not by advanced extraterrestrial beings, but by creatures engaged in wars, and even cannibalism. These “civilizations” were more like The First Men on the Moon of H.G. Wells than From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne. By 1950, von Braun had sent the manuscript of The Mars Project to more than a dozen publishers. All of them rejected the novel. In 1953, the University of Illinois published the Technical Appendix. The book languished for another nearly 60 years. It was finally published in 2006 by Apogee Books in Canada, under the title, Project Mars: A Technical Tale.

Apogee reports that the book has hardly sold at all. This is certainly a reflection of the lack of optimism about the future. Von Braun faced the same problem in the 1950s. He decided to take his space exploration program directly to the people and especially, young people, through the new medium of television.

Von Braun teamed up with Walt Disney to produce four television shows about space. Then on March 5, 1955, Man in Space was aired. It is estimated that 42 million people saw the program. The second show was Man on the Moon. And in December 1957 aired the third show, Mars and Beyond. Von Braun hoped that the television series would encourage young people to study science and learn about rockets and space.

IAF

Krafft Ehricke presented papers at many of the annual meetings of the International Astronautical Federation. Here he addresses the meeting in Copenhagen in 1955.

21st Century Science & Technology

Krafft Ehricke’s Expedition Ares, written in 1948, was published for the first time in the Spring 2003 issue of 21st Century Science & Technology magazine.

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Krafft Ehricke’s Expedition Ares

While von Braun was writing The Mars Project in the late 1940s at Fort Bliss, his neighbor, friend, and former Peenemünderer, Krafft Ehricke, was writing his own Mars tale, Expedition Ares. That they had collaborated on the two Mars tales is evidenced by the fact that Ehricke is the first person listed in the author’s acknowledgements in the introduction to The Mars Project.

But recently a new source of material, that here for the first time has been translated into English, has added to the picture of the relationship between the two men. In the von Braun archives at the Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where von Braun headed the Saturn V rocket program, there is a group of letters written in 1953-1955 between von Braun and Ehricke. The authors are quick to point out where they disagree in some technical details of their Mars missions. One ongoing bone of contention was the size of the expedition. Von Braun had proposed a flotilla of 10 interplanetary vessels with a total of 70 men. Ehricke believed this was too many people. He explains his thinking in a letter to von Braun, August 21, 1953:

I stand by the fact that a space ship crew can be organized in such a way that it can avoid the need of a much greater number of specialists, which by their very nature must carry with them much intellectual ballast, which has no relationship to the mission. For example, why should a navigator be a fully educated astronomer and know everything about the distribution of mass in the universe or the creation of energy in the inside of the star or the Nernstian pulsating universe or de Sitter’s theory, etc. A complete knowledge of the space ship; from the engine to the gyroscope is what’s necessary.

Such an expedition has therefore a chance to be done a second time and this is an important consideration for keeping it small. Each following expedition will have a new exploration task and will be carried out with better equipment, more skill in preparation, improved overall planning, and with trained personnel.

We still make today often the mistake of projecting the limited means of our present period into that of the era of space flight….

Finally, in a letter from Ehricke to von Braun, February 10, 1955, he discusses something personal that had troubled him: being drafted into the German Army in 1940 had interrupted his graduate studies and he had never obtained an advanced degree:

With regard to my academic ambitions, I believe that a degree would be helpful for possible research work in the future. It’s certainly the case that a degree does not in the least change a person’s abilities. But obviously this is not so evident to many others.

Von Braun responded on September 1, 1955:

I heard about your “Odysee” [Ehricke’s move from Buffalo to San Diego] in a roundabout way, and hope that you have now found a position where you can obtain your so warmly desired MS or PhD. But in all honesty, Mr. Krafft Ehricke would be just as dear to me as Krafft Ehricke, MS or Dr. Krafft Ehricke.

Ehricke’s 1948 Mars exploration book, Expedition Ares, met the same fate as Wernher von Braun’s The Mars Project. Ehricke’s approach, which is juxtaposed to that of von Braun, takes place 400 years into the future. Looking backwards from then to the present allows him to describe many of the scientific and technological breakthroughs across the centuries. Ehricke believed that “the future could not be built with yesterday’s technologies.”

To Ehricke, space exploration was not an extracurricular activity, but a function of an “extraterrestrial imperative.” For man to progress, he has no choice but to expand his world view and his realm of activity to the entire Universe. There are no limits to growth, Ehricke insisted, when that false notion became popular in the late 1960s, because there is no limit to man’s creativity.

Were man to deny that imperative, and try to live only within the fixed limits of his original home planet, Ehricke stated, the result would be geopolitical power politics, stagnation and eventually ecological crises, mass starvation, wars over limited raw materials, epidemics, and revolutions—a New Dark Age. Indeed, having ignored the warnings, we stand at that precipice today.

Ehricke believed that a new Renaissance was necessary. Works such as his Expedition Ares embody the optimism, the commitment to scientific and technological advancement, and the belief in the irrepressibility of the human spirit, that mankind must marshal today to make this, and other great projects, a reality.

This belief was also shared by economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche.

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

“Lyndon LaRouche was always rigorous in the economic changes that must precede a successful Mars exploration program, including breakthroughs in the development of thermonuclear energy.” Here, he gives a class in Leesburg, Virginia, July 8, 1985.

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Lyndon LaRouche and the Economics of

Space Exploration

One of the few national political figures who made the colonization of Mars an integral part of his political program was economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, who placed space exploration at the forefront of his economic program. LaRouche saw human space exploration as the cutting edge of scientific development. In 1988 he produced a half-hour TV program titled The Woman on Mars. LaRouche was ridiculed at the time by the media for promoting the very idea of Mars colonization.

At the same time, LaRouche was ridiculed for his public support of a U.S.-Soviet treaty to jointly build new defense systems capable of destroying nuclear missiles in flight, which would shift military doctrine from Mutually Assured Destruction to one of Mutually Assured Survival. The LaRouche policy was, in essence, adopted by President Reagan, who announced that change in policy in a national TV broadcast on March 23, 1983.

Lyndon LaRouche and his wife Helga Zepp-LaRouche worked with Krafft Ehricke during the last period of Ehricke’s life, united by their common commitment to space exploration and their opposition to the anti-technology environmentalist movement. In “The Science and Technology Needed to Colonize Mars,” published in 1986, and intended as a proposal for the long-term space policy of the Reagan Administration, LaRouche wrote:

We are presently developing each and all of the technologies needed to accomplish [the Moon-Mars mission], although it will take about forty years of scientific development and engineering to bring us to the point of applying those technologies to this specific task.

It is also economically feasible. For every penny the United States spent on the research and development work of the NASA manned landing on the Moon, we gained between ten cents and twenty cents of income, and perhaps even more, from the application of those technologies to our civilian economy.

Due to the difference in distance to Mars as compared to the Moon, setting the date for colonizing Mars had to wait, until we had begun to master four new kinds of physics breakthroughs: controlled thermonuclear fusion as the primary source of energy used, lasers and other forms of coherent electromagnetic pulses as a basic tool, new developments in biological science of the kind now emerging around optical biophysics, and much more powerful, more compact computer systems to assist us in handling these new physics technologies.

Reflecting some of the views of the then recently deceased Ehricke, LaRouche said that before colonists arrive to live on Mars, transportation and storage infrastructure should be in operation, to accommodate the tons of freight to be warehoused, arriving from Earth orbit. This facility could be in Mars’ orbit, or perhaps on the Martian moon, Phobos. “We might prefer to use a large orbiting, manned station ... on which technicians and scientists would serve a tour of duty.…”

Approaching space exploration from his expertise as an economist, LaRouche was always rigorous in the economic changes that he saw must proceed a successful Mars exploration program, including breakthroughs in the development of thermonuclear energy:

Fusion provides us the needed technology for powered interplanetary flight, superseding the problems of unpowered ballistic trajectories of spaceflight. Fusion is also indispensable for power to the colonies. Since we cannot carry vast quantities of manufactured articles or food from Earth to Mars, we must have tools specifically qualified to produce needed materials and articles from the raw materials of that planet. This requires not only very high quantities of power per-capita, but also energy-flux densities at least four times those prevailing in U.S. production. We require a universal class of tools, to use such very high energy-flux densities; we require the self-focusing characteristics of lasers and particle-beams, for example, which enable us to conquer every problem of materials. To feed the colonies, and long-range manned interplanetary expeditions, we require not merely present biotechnology, but the more profound capabilities locked up within optical biophysics.

And always with an eye on the transformative powers of these capabilities here on Earth, LaRouche adds:

It should follow, that if we can create and maintain viable cities in artificial environments on Mars, the Sahara and the Gobi deserts ought to be mastered easily by using the same technologies on Earth….

Krafft Ehricke, whose death at the early age of 67, was felt as a great loss by the LaRouches. In June 1985, the Fusion Energy Foundation and the Schiller Institute sponsored a conference dedicated to his memory. The proceedings were published in the book, Colonize Space: Open the Age of Reason. LaRouche said at the conference:

As each of us is born, each of us must die. Within that brief interval of life, what distinguishes a life as human, as exalted above the condition of mere beasts is that which the individual contributes to the enduring benefit of future generations.... Our beloved and most accomplished friend, Krafft Ehricke, has bequeathed to future generations a beautiful and most valuable gift.

If we wish to develop the SDI and its offshoots in the best way, the way to organize the program is as a by-product of a mission-assignment for colonizing first the Moon and then Mars. Every technology we require for military purposes, will appear as a by-product of the primary mission-assignment.

In LaRouche’s Woman on Mars, the trip from Earth begins in a trans-atmospheric vehicle, or space plane, which takes off like an airplane, as seen here in LaRouche’s broadcast. It takes passengers to an Earth-orbiting space station, where they transfer to a fusion-powered vehicle to Mars.

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Later in 2009, in response to a question from an economist at a webcast, LaRouche returned to the topic in the light of the recent discovery of significant quantities of helium-3 on the Moon:

We have to think about accelerated flight. We have on the Moon a resource we recognize as helium-3. The Sun has deposited a mineral on the surface of the Moon for a long time. Helium-3 happens to be a very useful item for space flight, because it can be very directly applied to the propulsion process. We could, technically, with helium-3 fusion, have a 1-gravity flight, from the orbit of the Moon to the orbit of Mars, which would get you between the two planets within a few days!

I’ve been committed to this for a long time, as some people know, since I did this half-hour film, The Woman on Mars, back in 1988, [for my presidential] campaign—and it’s still valid today—we will deal with Mars, we will conquer Mars, we will see what’s up there, we will see what use we’ll make of it. And we’ll change the nature of man’s conception of himself. Man will no longer think of himself as an Earth-bound landgrubber. (Not landlubber, but landgrubber.) And man will think of himself as man in the Solar System.

Einstein’s Friend, Walther Rathenau:

The Agapic Personality in Politics and Diplomacy

PART TWO OF TWO PARTS

by Judy Hodgkiss

Editor’s Note: This article was first published in English on the Schiller Institute website in June 2012, and in German as a two-part series on June 27, 2012 in the German newspaper, Neue Solidarität.

Bundesarchiv

Walther Rathenau, August 1, 1921.

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June 2012—The following, excerpted from a two-part article in the German newspaper, Neue Solidarität, is intended as a case study of the unique personality type capable of calm, creative leadership, as demonstrated in the atmosphere of panic in 1920s in Weimar Germany, or, as will be needed, in the existential crisis of today. Part One was reprinted in EIR Vol. 47, No. 35, August 28, 2020, pp. 48-60.

On June 24, 2012 we commemorate the 90th anniversary of the assassination of the German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, a singular figure in the industrialization and the political leadership of the German nation at the beginning of the 20th Century. His was a personality perfectly suited for leadership in a time of crisis. A model for today.

We will speak here of Rathenau’s accomplishments in industry, politics and diplomacy. But we cannot merely recount Rathenau’s monumental list of achievements as an industrialist—he did not consider himself as primarily an industrialist. Neither can we merely list his achievements in politics and diplomacy—he did not consider himself as primarily a politician or a diplomat. He thought of himself foremost as a writer, a philosopher, a poet, an artist, and a musician.

Therefore, when he devised his various policies, his first consideration was never what others might consider to be “practical”; he saw his fight against the British Empire as primarily a cultural fight, a battle for the “soul” of the German nation.

Rathenau served as political advisor—officially and unofficially—to almost all of the turn-of-the-century German governments: from the pre-war reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his cabinet; through the wartime emergency governments and the chaotic coups and counter-coups of the demobilization; then in the post-war Weimar Republic, until his death in 1922.

He brought to the service of his country, in each of these cases, a personality uniquely distilled from, and expressive of, the best of the German classical tradition. Whether devising policy for the colonies in Africa, negotiating the Rapallo Treaty with the Russians, or building the various private industries and concerns of which he and his father were a part, he always described his actions as being guided by that “German spirit which has sung and thought for the world,” a spirit which was, after the war, threatened with obliteration by those “who are blinded by hate.”[fn_1]

‘And I Feel It Cruelly’

But perhaps a more difficult prospect for Rathenau, over the years, than even the thought of his early physical demise, was his suffering over his increasing isolation from friends and collaborators, due, first to the effects of the slander campaign run against him, and, only secondarily, by that later environment of threats of physical violence.

Even before the war, the attacks on his writings had brought him much anguish. He wrote to a friend, Hermann Kröpelin, in 1912:

You want to write about my book? My friend, I must warn you. If you depart an inch from the stereotyped judgment: “witty, cold, a dilettante in sixteen subjects, and a tolerable business man,” you will be laughed to scorn. This is what people will have me to be, and I am content to be tolerated as a harmless fool. They ask me: “How do you find time for such nonsense?” and if I told them that that is my life, they would send for the doctor. Be prudent, dear friend; it is not considered good form to treat me kindly.[fn_2]

Even Lili Deutsch was affected by the accusations charging him with an unbridled egoism, and of having a split personality, i.e., that he was a hypocritical millionaire businessman who practiced “socialism” as a hobby. Rathenau answered her charges by developing a metaphor of how the human soul could be tuned to the music of the universe:

It is true that my nature is polyphonic. The melody rises like a treble above the other parts, but it is very seldom unaccompanied. And in the bass and tenor other sounds are heard, sometimes harmonizing, sometimes in utter discord with the song. I know incomparably better men, in fact great men, in whose every word and thought I detect the same phenomenon; in this I find I do not stand alone. Indeed, it sometimes seems as if it were this very strength or weakness which like a shell re-echoes, though faintly, the rush and roar of the whole world. Meanwhile the pure flute notes of more simple natures seem to me monotonous, charming and rather dull.

Now, this is why people are mistaken in me, because in this medley of voices they fail to recognize a melody. But I recognize one, and know that it is there, and that it controls all the rest.

And the proof of it is this: Life itself does not deceive, even if all else does. Now, consider my life. Do you know of another more earnest, more self-denying? And this is not due to lack of sensibility, or dullness. Nor is it due to any wish of mine. For I wish nothing. Ruthlessly though I have questioned my inner self, I have never found anything of this world that I wish. I wish what I must, otherwise nothing. And what I must, I see, as a wanderer by night sees by the light of his lantern only a few steps in front of him. That this my life is an oblation, offered gladly and willingly to the powers above, not for reward, nor in hope, this I may say, and you yourself know it; that I forfeit the love of my fellow-men in the process I know, and feel it cruelly.

And, in another letter, he answered her more directly:

On two points you do me an injustice. Over-estimation of self, indeed! I realize my limitations very precisely and have always respected them. But you do not realize them, for one does not exhaust a man’s possibilities in conversation. And despite everything, you are bound by the established opinion: “witty, subtle and cold.” No matter....

God be thanked. You may squabble as much as you like. For in the long run I would rather be scolded by you than praised by anyone [fn_3]

And then, with the initiation of his post-war political career, Rathenau found that, aside from Einstein, and Lili and her husband, Felix Deutsch, and a handful of his musician friends,[fn_4] very few of his old collaborators wished to be associated with him.

Gen. Paul von Hindenburg (later President) and Gen. Erich von Ludendorff, head of the Supreme Command. Rathenau advised both of them.

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On May 17, 1922, he wrote to Lili, just before his departure from the Genoa Conference (April 10-May 19). He had triumphed there with a promise won from the Allies of a provisional debt moratorium, won despite—or perhaps because of—his separate economic agreement negotiated on the side with the Russian delegation, at a short distance from Genoa, in the small seaside town of Rapallo.

Rathenau had triumphed, but he knew that he would return to Germany, not as just that pernicious Jew who wanted to negotiate with the Allies rather than to prepare to fight them again; but, now he would be that Communist Jew, who preferred to negotiate, above all, with the Bolsheviks, even more than with the other enemies of the state. But, in spite of it all, Rathenau was able to write, with the remarkable calm of a Joan of Arc at her trial, or of a Martin Luther King giving his Mountaintop speech, in what would be his last letter to Lili:

Why trouble to ponder over it all? When we look back over these years, hasn’t everything that happened and had to happen been for the best?

I often think, and it is my greatest comfort: What a wretched sort of life is that which merely runs its even course untroubled! The wonderful thing is that all true sorrow is beautiful. Only the stupidly awry and the arbitrarily distorted is ugly. In our life everything has been Law; thus were the facts, and thus their predestined course. Nothing has been in vain; nothing can now be thought away or given up.

And if you honestly reflect you will find that even what seemed to be Chance was really Necessity. And is Chance going to have his own way now? My life has run too far along its course for that to be possible.

Now at last I am free of my fellow men. Not in the sense that I could ever be indifferent to them. On the contrary, the freer I am the nearer and dearer—despite all—they are to me; and I joyfully recognize that I exist for them, not they for me....

Certainly there is not much more that I can do. The flame burns low. But you know it is my destiny to be ready to lift from others the burden that oppresses them and to remain myself without desire....

Affectionately, W.[fn_5]

‘Responsibility Exerted to the Utmost’

During the war, Rathenau had not only served with the War Raw Materials Department, but he had played a role as an unofficial advisor to Erich Ludendorff, the Head of the Supreme Command, and, also, in 1916, as a negotiator for peace.

In his diary, Rathenau described his negotiations with Colonel Edward House, who served, officially, as President Wilson’s personal representative in Europe, but was, in actuality, the top agent of London in Washington, D.C. In January of 1916, while the United States was not yet involved in the war, House was in Berlin, pretending to be an honest broker between the Germans and the British. Rathenau met with House at the home of U.S. Ambassador Gerard, the evening of January 30:

[After dinner] House kept me back in the dining room and the table was cleared. He had been in Paris for only one day, whereas he had spent several days in London ... He considers that [British Foreign Secretary] Grey is ready to conclude a peace, and, what is more, under the unchanged, original English conditions, namely: surrender of [German occupied] Belgium and northern France without compensation [to Germany].... There would be compensations to be gained (Belgian, Congo, etc.) He can see no fear of France being disappointed, but America would, above all, use all its power to guarantee the so-called freedom of the seas and to eliminate every future possibility of a blockade [of Germany].[fn_6]

Edward “Colonel” House leaves Versailles after the signing of the treaty, June 28, 1919.

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House then proceeded to London, where he and Grey issued a completely contrary memorandum, one that House knew would be totally unacceptable to the Germans. It not only excluded any compensation to Germany, but it also included the demand that Germany cede the Alsace-Lorraine to France.

Germany’s response, against Rathenau’s advice, was to escalate with a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. The British certainly rejoiced: they knew that this could be the provocation that would bring the U.S. into the war on the side of Britain. The U.S., in fact, declared war on Germany April 6, 1917.

Rathenau, unlike his more fantasy-ridden countrymen, knew that this was the end for Germany, that there was no longer any way to win the war: There had to be a halt to the submarine warfare, and an immediate negotiated peace. Rathenau described a dinner party debate, recorded in his diary of May 2, 1917:

At dinner I sat between the Chancellor [Bethmann] and Countess Zech and conversation, which [Secretary of the Interior] Helfferich kept steering towards political and business matters, naturally turned to submarine warfare. I said jokingly to Helfferich, who was sitting diagonally opposite to me and who was bringing up the familiar arguments, that I believed his predictions would be completely borne out: by the New Year 120-150 percent of the English merchant fleet would be sunk, nevertheless England would still be feeding herself and shooting. The Chancellor remained very reserved; Helfferich repeated his arguments and I asked him whether he was aware of England’s daily subsistence level, expressed in tons. This was not the case, and those present seemed rather surprised when I gave the figure of 12,000 tons—that is to say, the contents of one big, two medium or three smaller ships.

After dinner the Chancellor took me into a side room, and our conversation regarding the submarine question was continued confidentially.

Rejecting Rathenau’s advice, Germany pursued the war, submarine warfare and all, to its disastrous conclusion. Here, The Return of Submarine U-9 to Wilhelmshaven, Germany, a painting by Willy Stöwer.

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‘A Question of World History’

But Bethmann, although in complete agreement with Rathenau’s assessment, suffered a failure of nerve. Then, in July, Rathenau had a private, three-hour meeting with Ludendorff, where he again pursued the problem with the submarine warfare, and the need to sue for peace while it were still possible to have it on honorable terms. The diary of July 10, says:

Ludendorff now explained that he was not at all opposed to a negotiated peace, and never had been; that he merely considered the mood in the country as important and that one had only to bring in the negotiator to him.... I answered that I did not consider mood as an applicable measurement....

[Ludendorff] repeatedly asserted that he himself neither maintained the annexationists’ point of view, nor did he intend to interfere in political developments.... I said to him that whatever the future Government looked like, close co-operation between it and the Supreme Command, that is himself, was absolutely indispensable for the good of the country. He underestimated his power, as I had already told him months before; he possessed an authority close on dictatorship and with it responsibility as well, and history would hold him to it.

He replied that I still overestimated his power, that he could not approach the Kaiser and that he was hemmed in on all sides.

I answered by emphasizing the incredibly confused leadership in our power structure: the Under-Secretaries of State are powerless because the Chancellor is above them. The Chancellor cannot do anything if he does not have the sanction of Headquarters. At Headquarters Ludendorff is hampered by [President] Hindenburg, who switches over to the Kaiser whenever he taps him on the shoulder. The Kaiser himself thinks that he is obeying the constitution and thus the circle is complete. However, here it is a question not of ‘uniform hierarchy’ but rather of world history.

As we know, Ludendorff failed the test of history. Germany pursued the war, the submarine warfare and all, to its disastrous conclusion. On September 28, 1918—much too late—Ludendorff finally asked political leaders in Berlin to sue for peace. He would resign his office October 26.

But on October 7, Rathenau had swung into action. He wrote in the Vossische Zeitung against a precipitous armistice. Rathenau wanted, instead, a mobilization of all possible reserves, “a national defense, the rising up of the nation.... It is peace we want, not war. But not a peace of surrender.”[fn_7]

General Maximilian Hoffman supported Rathenau’s idea of a levee en masse, of an additional one and one half million soldiers for a last stand against an invasion of Germany. This was to be done at the same time that all submarine warfare would be ended. Through this, Germany would regain the moral high ground; otherwise, the country would suffer more from its own internal divisions and recriminations of left vs. right, than it would from either a desperate war on its own territory or from a subsequent full occupation. The worse horror would be that of Germany losing its “soul.”

That prescient thought would drive every action taken by Rathenau in the next four, short years left to him.

At the same time that Rathenau was organizing for a last-stand defense, he was also preparing for the possibility of the alternative. On October 15, he had a meeting with the War Minister to discuss a demobilization plan that would avoid civil disturbances and that would transition industry to peaceful production.

Bundesarchiv

Philipp Scheidemann, standing in a Chancellery window, proclaims Germany to be a republic, November 9, 1918.

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But soon everything began to unravel. With the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm, and the complete collapse and resignation of Ludendorff, the new Scheidemann government, in a panic, signed a “Pre-Armistice Agreement” on November 9, that pledged Germany to compensation for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allies. In January, the Paris Peace Conference began, with no representation from Germany even allowed until after the terms of the treaty would be agreed upon by the Allies—which did not happen until May. In the meanwhile, Germany was racked by chaotic violence and food shortages. While the negotiations were moved to Versailles, and dragged on through May, Rathenau wrote for the journal, Zukunft (The Future), May 31st:

What is to be done? At Versailles we must do our utmost to effect some radical improvement in the Treaty. If we succeed, well and good—then sign it. But if we do not, what then? In that case neither active nor passive resistance should be attempted. In that case the negotiator, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, must deliver to the enemy governments the duly executed decree dissolving the National Assembly, and the resignation of the President and ministers, and invite them to take over without delay the sovereign rights of the German Reich and the whole machinery of government. Hereby the responsibility for the peace, for the administration, for all Germany’s actions, would fall to the enemy; and before the world, before history, and before their own peoples, they would be faced with the care of sixty millions. It would be a case without parallel, the unprecedented downfall of a nation, but at the same time a course compatible with honor and conscience. For the rest, we must trust to the inalienable right of mankind—and the clearly predictable march of events.[fn_8]

Again, Rathenau went unheeded. In January of 1920, the Versailles Treaty went into effect and the Reparation Commission began operation. The unpayable debt was to be collected, at all costs.

Germany reacts to Versailles in political cartoons: The “Council of Four” force-feeding their peace terms to Germany, “like it or not”; and (below) the “Big Three” (Wilson, Clemenceau, Lloyd George) preparing to execute the bound and shirtless German.

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From Technical Advisor to Foreign Minister

It was not until the July Spa Conference (Belgium), that Germany, after having weathered a series of attempted coups in Berlin and failed insurrections in other cities, was stable enough to offer a proposed payment schedule for reparations, to be made in gold marks, and also a schedule for coal deliveries to France. Rathenau was part of the German delegation, having been designated “technical advisor” by the finance minister, Joseph Wirth, a former mathematics professor and a personal friend of Rathenau’s.

To no one’s surprise, Germany soon faltered in its payments of gold marks, and even struggled to produce the coal shipments. A conference of the Allies in Paris, in January, decided on a schedule of a series of payments, starting low, but rising astronomically over the next three years. A London Conference in March brought the German delegation back in to negotiate. Rathenau made a unique proposal: allow Germany to absorb the British and French war debts owed to the U.S.—The Germans of course would prefer to negotiate with the Americans. But this proposal, and all of the others from the Germans were rejected. The conference broke down and France occupied Düsseldorf, Duisburg and Ruhrort, threatening the entire Ruhr region.

A second London Conference was convened at the end of April with ultimata issued by London and Paris. On May 10, the Fehrenbach government collapsed, and Joseph Wirth headed up a new government coalition. Wirth accepted the London Ultimatum; but at the same time he named Rathenau to a newly created post, Minister for Reconstruction—reconstruction of northern France, that is, not of Germany. From that position, Rathenau entered into secret negotiations with the French Interior Minister Loucheur—a reasonable man—with the aim of replacing cash reparations with payment-in-kind, including free German labor to reconstruct northern France.

On October 6, the “Wiesbaden Agreement” was signed with Loucheur. On October 12, the British-controlled League of Nations announced the partition of Upper Silesia. The Wirth government had to go into emergency session.

Rathenau urged the government to resign. The Cabinet Minutes for the day, characterized Rathenau’s speech to the ministers:

[Rathenau said] No one would understand if the Cabinet stayed together after territory had been taken from us. There was a point where logic must cease to operate, and emotion take over. The Cabinet would no longer enjoy the respect of the nation. This was a question of character. Logic would have to give way to character. Determination and emotion were decisive at a moment like this.... He recommended resigning today, while their hands were still free.[fn_9]

Which is what they did. Here, finally, a seemingly outrageous proposal by Rathenau was implemented. And it worked. The right-wing was destabilized and unable to form a government. Wirth’s government reformed, but this time without Rathenau’s participation. This allowed Rathenau, who was the particular target of the right-wing, to keep his hands clean of the partition question; but, at the same time, Wirth continued to use him as his most valuable negotiator: this time as Private Citizen Rathenau.

By the end of November, Rathenau was back in London, this time alone, to negotiate a bridge loan, which, in actuality, would be a moratorium on German debt. Rathenau telegraphed back to Wirth, December 6, 1921: Prime Minister Lloyd George and Bank of England head Montagu Norman had made three demands of Germany, these to be in exchange for a combination of moratorium and the promise of further reparation conferences, a smaller one to be held at Cannes, then a larger one at Genoa. The three demands: “cessation of [government] subsidies, balancing the budget, closing down of the money printing presses.”[fn_10]

Rathenau and Wirth agreed to present London with a deflationary program by January 28, that was to include mass layoffs of workers in national enterprises, such as the railroads. The hope was to achieve wiggle room at the upcoming conferences.

In his Cannes, January 11, 1922, speech, Rathenau argued against both the inflationary reparations program and the deflationary austerity program. He said that unemployment and doubling or trebling of taxes would equal the ruin of the German economy.

France’s Prime Minister Briand was receptive; but he was abruptly recalled to Paris, where he was forced to resign while the conference was still ongoing. But the Reparation Commission did grant the postponement of Germany’s debt payments that were to be due in January, February and April, and were replaced by payments-in-kind.

Rathenau was appointed Foreign Minister on January 31.

The Russian Question

The trump card held by Rathenau was Russia. Rathenau had been engaged in a dialogue with the Russians since he had established a Commission for the Study of Russian Affairs, in February of 1920. On March 10, 1920, he wrote a letter to Professor Hoffmann at Wilhelmshaven, on the project:

I am in complete agreement with you as to the necessity of finding some common ground between Russia and ourselves. At the present time Bolshevism is only a facade; what we are really confronted with is a rigidly oligarchic agrarian republic, which in spite of all its difficulties is, I believe, destined to last. True, it will be a long time before Russia is strong enough to grant us economic compensations.... It is my hope that the labors of the Commission will bring about the first and decisive rapprochement in the economic sphere, to be followed, let us hope, by a corresponding rapprochement in the political sphere.[fn_11]

The Soviet delegation is received at the Brest-Litovsk train station by the German negotiators, prior to negotiations for the treaty, February 1918.

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The Versailles Treaty’s nullification of the German-Russian 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had left relations between the two countries in limbo. Bolshevik Russia had not been invited to the Paris Peace Conference, and, later, when the Allies established relations with the Russian government, the main item on the agenda was the question of Russia’s pre-war debts to the West.

The British planned to use the Genoa Conference in April—the first conference to which Russia was invited—to disrupt the dialogue which Rathenau had been conducting with the Russian ambassador to Germany, Adolph Joffe. Joffe would be at the Genoa Conference, accompanying Russian Foreign Minister Georgi Chicherin.

Lloyd George had promised Rathenau open public discussions at Genoa of the Russian question; but (not for the first time) he lied. Several days into the conference, Rathenau was handed the Allies’ proposal for a German-Russian treaty, negotiated with maximum pressure on Chicherin, and without German participation. Rathenau said to the chair of the Genoa Conference, the Italian politician, Gianni:

The agreement with Russia has been made without consulting us. You have arranged a nice dinner party to which we have not been invited, and now you ask us how we like the menu.[fn_12]

Bundesarchiv

Rathenau and Alfredo Frassati, Italian Ambassador to Berlin, in Genoa, Italy, during the Rapallo Conference nearby, April 1922.

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Rathenau returns to the Genoa Conference on April 16, 1922, following his signing of the Rapallo Treaty with the Soviets.

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On the morning of April 16, while the Genoa Conference was ongoing, Rathenau met with the Russian delegation at a seaside town outside of Genoa, called Rapallo, where they drew up a treaty of their own design, based on economic cooperation among equals. They presented the Rapallo Treaty as a fait accompli to the conference that afternoon. After a few days of hysteria, the delegates, and the international media gathered there, settled down, and Germany was even allowed to continue negotiations on its debt payment extensions. Rathenau was to return to Germany a success.

But Rathenau knew what that “success” meant for him, personally. We saw earlier he had soberly written to Lili from Genoa, soon after his Rapallo victory: “There is not much more that I can do. The flame burns low.”

In what was likely to have been a British Intelligence probe of his security, Rathenau was visited at his home, just a few days before his murder, by a Col. Stuart Roddie, who was a member of the British embassy in Berlin, and what Count Kessler called a “confidant” of Lloyd George. Kessler interviewed Roddie later and reported in his diary Roddie’s description of the evening. Whether or not events transpired as described by Roddie, the report is chilling:

He recalled how he visited Rathenau’s house in Grunewald three or four days before the assassination. As he drove up, he was stopped by two men in civilian clothes. Whom, they asked, did he want to see? He produced his papers and was allowed to pass. Going into the house, he heard music in a room to the right of the entrance, went in, and saw Rathenau seated at the piano, playing by candlelight. Rathenau jumped up and apologized. Roddie told him that he was glad to find that he was taking security precautions. This excited Rathenau immensely. He hurried to the telephone, rang up some office, and demanded categorically that the police protection be removed, saying that he forbade the molestation of his guests. By the time Roddie left, the police guard had disappeared.[fn_13]

‘He Lived Wonderfully’

On June 24, Rathenau was shot multiple times, as he was driving just a few blocks from his house.

His home was turned into a museum, with everything left as it was that morning. On the second anniversary of his death, a journalist, Joseph Roth, reported on his visit to the house, in an article for the Frankfurter Zeitung, June 24, 1924:

I’m sorry to say that the Rathenau Museum is not open to the general public. To inspect the house on Königsallee, you will need a pass from the keeper of paintings. Foreign visitors on the whole don’t want to put themselves to the trouble of visiting government premises in Berlin ... [and] for the most part it is foreigners who want to see where the man—who died so terribly—lived.

He lived wonderfully. Among great books and rare objects, amid beautiful paintings and colors, with useless, sublime, tiny, fragile, impressive, tenderness-eliciting, powerful, dreamy things; surrounded by evidence of the human past, of human wisdom, human beauty, human strength, and human suffering: by the breath of the eternal human. That is what makes outlandish things seem familiar and foreign things at home here. Even the downright “exotic” doesn’t dazzle, doesn’t overpower, confuse, or startle. Its surprise is gently administered. Distancing things extend an invitation. Intimate things are discreet. A loving hand has instinctively created order here. Following hidden inner laws, a prophetic eye has searched. A brilliantly imaginative pedantry has had its way here, classifying and bringing together. Everything here—the books, the cabinets, the tables—is lovingly and indulgently allowed the secret rhythm of its natural being.

The house is an organic whole, wisely divided into above and below: the upstairs with bedrooms and bathroom, guest room, and small private study and the more professional, more official downstairs, where there is also the main study, the desk of the man in public life (the one upstairs is that of the private citizen and writer—I almost said: poet). Everywhere there are the books, the symbols of this life.... There is almost no name in the great and unending history of literature that is not represented here.

There is a New Testament with the Greek text and Luther’s translation. Rathenau compared the translation with the original, noted points of difference, sprinkled astonished and quietly plangent question marks in the margin. Discrepancies are shot down with discreet little arrows, the texts are treated roughly as a military strategist would treat his field of operations on a General Staff map. He campaigned with thoughts, put errors to flight, surrounded them, conquered new worlds and distant works, allied himself with lasting powers. He was like a peaceful commander of the intellect; with love for the little beauties of daily life, the ornamental culture of domesticity. Upstairs, on his own, his very own personal walls, he hung pictures that he’d painted himself, the works of a writer who liked to dabble in other arts....

On his desk upstairs I saw a book called: German Youth and the Needs of the Hour. Oh, he always overestimated that part of German youth whose victim he was to be. In one room, on one table, in peaceful and significant proximity I found the wise old Shulchan Aruch the religious rule book of Diaspora Orthodoxy, and the old Weissenfelsische Songbook [Lutheran Hymns]. Pervading the house and the being of this man was the spirit of conciliation. His life is characterized by its attempt to bring together antiquity, Judaism, and early Christianity. A strong chord of conciliation is sounded in the books he read and those he wrote. It was the effort to bring the various instruments of different cultural worlds within the ambit of a single orchestra. By day he read and studied the New Testament. It lay beside his bed to fill him with its love. He was a Christian; you won’t find a better one...

I walk past the place where he met his end. It is not true that a murder is just a murder. This one here was a thousandfold murder, not to be forgotten or avenged.[fn_14]

Bundesarchiv

Above: one million people rally in Berlin, in tribute to their fallen Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau, June 25, 1922. Count Kessler: “The response which had been denied to Rathenau’s life and thought was now accorded to his death.” Below: A float bearing wreaths, before departing for Rathenau’s gravesite.

Bundesarchiv

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‘The Unity of Spiritual Responsibility’

Many others in Germany felt the same grief, though more vague, less eloquent. Kessler reported:

Not since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln has the death of a statesman so shaken a whole nation. The trades unions had decreed a general holiday throughout the Reich from midday Tuesday to early Wednesday morning. Stupendous processions, such as Germany had never witnessed, marched in order under the Republican flag through all the cities of the land. Over a million took part in Berlin, a hundred and fifty thousand in Munich and Chemnitz, a hundred thousand in Hamburg, Breslau, Elberfield, Essen. Never before had a German citizen been so honored. The response which had been denied to Rathenau’s life and thought was now accorded to his death.[fn_15]

Albert Einstein, like his friend Walther Rathenau, fought for the soul of Germany and for all of humanity. Here, Einstein lectures in Vienna in 1921.

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We end with a fitting eulogy, taken from the last section of John Finley’s article on Rathenau, written for the New York Times one week after the assassination. Finley lamented how brief his meeting with Rathenau had been. If only he had known the sure way to prolong the visit: ask Rathenau to play something on the piano for him. Rathenau likely would have obliged with the Waldstein, always his favorite.

As it was, the American was deeply affected by his visit with the industrialist/politician/poet/artist/musician. He ended his article with the following:

[Our meeting] was but a month before he came into office. And he did not forswear his views when entering the Cabinet. He was still convinced that the whole system of economic organization was to undergo a great change, under new capitalistic forms. But all this, he contended, must await popular support. He would not “drill firemen during a fire”; he would not, to use Lincoln’s homely illustration, “swap horses while crossing a stream.” He was joining a cabinet “for doing things,” and would try to find a way to reconcile the German people with the rest of the world—a way of coming to an understanding with their neighbors.

How fearlessly and effectively he began this reconciliating task, his successful negotiations with Loucheur showed. Heavy as the burden of reparations was, he insisted that the confidence of the world could be recovered only in the degree that the obligation was fulfilled, that the people of the earth were not 100 per cent chauvinists, that some people were fair-minded, that the only question was how great the sacrifice must be and that it was necessary to fulfill a duty which is a world duty.

It is difficult to believe that one who spoke these words could have signed the Rapallo Treaty with other than the honest purpose, which he states in his own apologia, as sent to me, or as Chancellor Wirth stated it, with his Minister of Foreign Affairs sitting near him in the attitude of the Penseur before the Reichstag. For Rathenau’s one possessing desire was to see the planetary spirit “struggling as an integer” for the unity and solidarity of the human commonwealth and for the “unity of spiritual responsibility.”...

It would seem, he said, that the thing we seek, like the red glow of the sunset, could not spread across the skies and cover the earth “until the sun from which it radiates had set.” But of this certainty he died possessed: that “that which has been created becomes part of the consciousness of the planetary spirit,” and that it “matters nothing if the records on parchment, metal and stone have been destroyed.” He would doubtless have added that it matters nothing if individuals go.

[fn_1]. “Open Letter to All Who Are Not Blinded by Hate,” December 1918, as printed in Nach der Flut (After the Flood), as quoted in Rathenau: His Life and Work, Count Harry Kessler, Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1930. (Original German version, 1928.) [back to text for fn_1]

[fn_2]. Rathenau to Herman Kröpelin, January 20, 1912, as quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_2]

[fn_3]. Rathenau to Lili Deutsch, date unknown; Rathenau to Lili Deutsch, July 29, 1906, as quoted in Kessler. Rathenau’s most revealing statements are taken from his correspondence with his women friends, particularly Lili Deutsch, the wife of his business partner, Felix Deutsch, Chairman of AEG. Rathenau’s relationship with Lili was intense, but not adulterous; and, despite the sometimes-intimate tone of the letters, both correspondents wrote with an eye to future publication. In 1924, Lili turned the letters over to Count Harry Kessler for use in his account of Rathenau’s life, which, though hopelessly romanticized (with proto-fascist overtones, as his frequent references to Nietzsche reveal), yet has a particular usefulness, in that its English translation provides a wide selection of extensive quotes from Rathenau’s writings and correspondence, otherwise available only in the original German. [back to text for fn_3]

[fn_4]. Karl Klingler, first violinist of the Klingler Quartet, and formerly violist for Joseph Joachim’s quartet, not only maintained his close friendship with Rathenau, but also remained a close friend of Einstein, until Einstein left Berlin in 1933; and, beyond that time, remained a dear friend of Max Planck’s, throughout the war, including through the time that Planck’s son, a German officer, was killed by Hitler for his involvement in the resistance. A two-disc CD by the Klingler Quartet, recorded in London in the 1930s, is available on Amazon.com. It is called, Klingler Quartet: The Joachim Tradition. [back to text for fn_4]

[fn_5]. Rathenau to Lili Deutsch, May 17, 1922, as quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_5]

[fn_6]. Walther Rathenau: Industrialist, Banker, Intellectual, and Politician: Notes and Diaries, 1907-1922, Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ed., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985. [back to text for fn_6]

[fn_7]. As quoted in Notes. [back to text for fn_7]

[fn_8]. As quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_8]

[fn_9]. As quoted in Notes. [back to text for fn_9]

[fn_10]. Notes. [back to text for fn_10]

[fn_11]. As quoted in Kessler. [back to text for fn_11]

[fn_12]. As relayed by Kessler, himself, who was part of the German delegation to the conference. [back to text for fn_12]

[fn_13]. Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918-1937), Charles Kessler, trans. and ed., Grove Press, New York, 2002. [back to text for fn_13]

[fn_14]. What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933, Joseph Roth, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2003. [back to text for fn_14]

[fn_15]. Kessler. [back to text for fn_15]