Fredrick Töben reviews: James O’Brien: Hoover’s Millions and how He Made Them

Hesperian Press 2005 ISBN 085905 340 7, Victoria Park 6979, Western Australia

www.hesperianpress.com, books@hesperianpress.com

Mention the name Hoover and you may think of a vacuum cleaner or of J Edgar Hoover the homosexual head of the FBI who, among others, viciously prosecuted/persecuted homosexuals, or you may recall Herbert C Hoover who was the President of the USA.

In the above biography, first published in 1932, then suppressed, and now re-published by a Western Australian boutique publisher, Hesperian Press – which specialises in specific Western Australian history – author James O’Brien attempts to set the record straight on the person who was US president from 1928 to 1932. The author’s Foreword sets the tone of the enterprise that promises to bring some balance into the public image of Herbert Hoover:

“ Herbert Hoover’s history shows that he is both morally and legally unfit to hold the great office of president of our country. Morally, because he has never been engaged in any honest business, profession, or vocation during his long life. Legally, because he obtained the great office of president by fraud and deceit by hiding his past record; and fraud of the worst kind because the men who had been sending forth propaganda as to his great ability as an engineer, his great business record, his great work in the Belgium relief had been hired by himself to put out this fictitious propaganda which this book shows is all fraud. And a title obtained to anything whether goods, lands or office by fraud and deceit is null and void in Law and Equity.”

It is evident that O’Brien attempts to set a high moral standard, and in order to be balanced in his work he even communicated with a Hoover supporter, Senator Borah, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and informed Borah about his critical re-appraisal of Hoover’s character. In a letter dated July 29, 1929 from Senator Borah to O’Brien we read:

“I am in receipt of your letter under date of July 26th. As I gather from your letter, you have some facts which you deem of much importance and I gather also from your letter you propose to make these facts public. I think if you have the facts and you deem them important to the public, you are doing your duty in making them public. Very respectfully, WM. E. BORAH.

Well, after the Bill Clinton presidency, surely one may say with certainty that nothing would surprise the American people anymore about the ‘moral turpitude’ of their various presidents. Would any US citizen today blush when reading O’Brien’s 456-page book that deals with the life of one of their pre-World War Two presidents?

If we turn to the final page in this un-indexed book, page 456, then it’s clearly a moral worry that is motivating O’Brien, much as any concerned citizen would and should still nurture when it comes to evaluating the character of their political representatives. It is significant that he uses public record – court case material to tell the story of Hoover’s life.

On this final page O’Brien offers an example of political corruption/censorship, which enables us to understand why in the ‘free and democratic western world’ and elsewhere the political climate has become so pervasively cynical, even nihilistic, and where consumerism/hedonism offers an easy way out of what essentially is a celebration of immorality/self-destruction:

The New York Herald, January 14, 1932.

“BELGIUM REGRETS ITEMS ABOUT U.S. IN PRESS”, attack on Mr Hoover repudiated by foreign office and in a dispatch from Paris the Tribune states:

“News from Paris censored.

PARIS, Jan. 13 (UP). – Leon Noel, director of the French Surete Generale (secret police), admitted at a luncheon of the Anglo-American Press Association today that censorship was being exercised over news transmitted from Paris. ‘The censorship machinery established under the old law is enforced,’ he said. ‘not to curb legitimate news, but to control it and prevent distribution of reports which might be harmful to international relations.”

Then these two sentences end O’Brien’s book:

“We see that friend Laval, President of the Council of Ministers of France, must have had a pleasant time when he visited Mr Hoover in Washington a few months ago. He is now suppressing the truth about Mr Hoover.”

Why, you may ask, would a small Australian book publisher bother to re-publish a book of such nature? In his Introduction to the book Peter Bridge says why. He found that George Nash’s 1988 multi-volumed biography of Hoover does not make any reference to O’Brien’s book.

Nor have any of Australia’s ‘court historians’, who have written about Hoover’s business activities in Australia, made mention of Hoover’s role in Western Australian mining history and capital manipulation that brought about the hiring of cheap untrained foreign labour for the mines.

Bridge concludes that:

“Globalists and free traders will denounce the republication of this book. They echo Hoover’s economic policies and his hatred for the Australian worker.”

Bridge also quotes from The Sun, Kalgoorlie, which in 1905 published a telling verse:

“The curse of Bewick-Moreing dark upon the mulga hangs,

They starve the mines, they sweat the men and grease the head serangs,

From Esperance to Murchison is in their vampire grip,

It’s like a trip to foreign parts to do the Outback Trip.”

*

Let’s briefly focus on some of the interesting matters raised in this 28-chapter book, and find out what Hoover was up to in Western Australia.

When on 13 May 1897 Herbert Hoover arrived on the S.S. Victoria at Albany, Western Australia, he “with the other passengers were put in the quarantine shed for 5 days”.

This reminds me of the nonsense written about how Germans are supposed to have treated the people destined for the concentration camps upon their arrival, especially at Auschwitz-Birkenau: Selection at the railway siding/ramp – to the right for death-inducing hard slave labour, and to the left, immediate gassing.

The quarantine station used by Australian authorities in the Sydney area can still be viewed www.adelaideinstitute.org/ , and it resembles that of those found at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other such camps, with large de-fumigation ovens and shower facilities. The procedure to which individuals were subjected to would have been much like that found at Albany and what Herbert Hoover would have had to endure in 1897.

The official version of Hoover’s 18 months stay in Western Australia lists him having discovered and managed the Sons of Gwalia mine. O’Brien states that Hoover “Discovered nothing at all”, but was rather good at writing manipulative-false reports that caused the stock of various mines to rise.

Likewise during his stay in China where Hoover ventured after his employer, Bewick, Moreing & Co, expanded its mineral operations into China. O’Brien details other foreign involvement in the Chinese mineral boom and noted, among others, German and Belgian citizens protecting their mineral concessions. The climate was ripe for “I Ho Ch’wan” – “The Harmony of Fists Society”, i.e. “Boxers”, to drive the ‘foreign devils into the sea’.

It was after this 15 June-15 July 1900 ‘Boxer rebellion’ that Hoover was regarded a hero, something not supported by any documentary evidence: “…whilst in Rasmussen’s History of Tientsin, the name of every man and woman who took part in the defense of Tientsin, except the soldiers and marines, is mentioned; even nursemaids and a Chinese policeman. The name of HOOVER is conspicuous by its absence”.

This factual matter reminds me how until the 1988 second Zündel Toronto Holocaust Trial historians claimed there were two written Hitler Orders that started the extermination process of European Jewry. Under cross-examination, Professor Raul Hilberg had to admit that the two written orders he mentioned in his book, The Destruction of European Jews, did not exist.

But just like in the above Hoover case this lack of documentation has not prevented historians from claiming the extermination was a fact, without an order. The claim is made that the German bureaucrats involved in such a huge enterprise knew what the Führer wanted done, i.e. a wink and a nudge started the process, without leaving any evidence behind!

In London Hoover continued to represent Chinese company interests but his fraudulent dealings and stock manipulations caught up with him, and local Chinese pulled down the British flag and hoisted their own dragon flag. In 1907 on the Stock Exchange the Zinc Corporation was called the ‘Stink Corporation’.

O’Brien puts it thus: “Yes, the shareholders of this mine paid dearly for their belief that this stock huxtering, stock promoting and manipulating firm of Hoover-Moreing and Company knew something about mining engineering and mine management.

And so it continues: In Nigeria with tin mines, in Burma and gold mines, in India, Nicaragua,New Zealand, Klondyke-Canada, and of course back in Australia-Western Australia-Victoria-New South Wales. Of course, there was also oil in California and Russia.

In the penultimate chapter O’Brien spells it out in clear tables: ‘False Reports made by Hoover on different Mines’.

The final chapter is headed: ‘The Doctor of Sick Mines OR Bringing the Dead to Life’, where the first paragraph spells it out again that Hoover was good at what to this day seems a solid business practice/virtue: manipulating stocks, thereby defrauding gullible investors of their money.

The New York Times, September 30, 1931, says that James F Burke “Pictures Hoover as Doctor At the Side of Sick Business.” The word Doctor has several meanings; “1, to repair – to heal. 2, to alter with a view to deceive. 3, a physician. 4, a Leech. Hence, figuratively, one who draws upon or appropriates or filches the substance or wealth of others.” [Original punctuation retained]

Is this a fitting epitaph for Herbert Hoover, US President from 1928 to 1932?

www.adelaideinstitute.org/newsletters/n397.htm