The Original Vampires

Part 0: The Original Vampires — Where the Monster Class Came From

The Original Sins (1600s-1860s)

The capital pools that funded every subsequent layer of American oligarchy trace to three sources: slavery, land theft, and narcotics.

Slavery Built Wall Street — Literally

The name "Wall Street" originates from a wall built by enslaved Africans in 1653. In 1711, the New York City Common Council established the city's first official slave market at the corner of Wall and Pearl Streets. It operated until 1762.

By 1860, cotton represented more than half of all US exports. Lower Manhattan was populated with cotton brokers, bankers, merchants, shippers, and insurers who all profited from slave labor. Northern banks were the only institutions large enough to extend massive lines of credit to plantation owners for buying seed, equipment, and human beings. Insurance companies — New York Life, Aetna, US Life — sold policies on enslaved people. Moses Taylor, President of City Bank of New York (predecessor of Citibank), funneled immense sums from slavery into industrial development and modern corporations.

Northern banking capital did not exist in opposition to Southern slavery. It was built on top of it. The capital pools that later funded the Gilded Age monopolies trace directly to the cotton/slavery financial complex.

The Opium Trade

The Delano family fortune — the maternal fortune of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt — was built on opium smuggling into China. Warren Delano Jr. went to China at age 24 to work for Russell & Company, the biggest American trading firm in China. By 1843, he was head partner, running floating warehouses where ships would offload opium contraband before continuing to Canton with legal cargo.

When columnist Westbrook Pegler accused FDR of living off a fortune wrested from "a slave traffic as horrible and degrading as prostitution," the White House maintained discreet silence.

The families that would later shape American foreign and financial policy — the Delanos, the Russells, the Forbes family of Boston — accumulated their original capital through narcotics trafficking.

Native American Land Theft

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized the deportation of 100,000 men, women, and children. But the Dawes Act of 1887 completed the theft at industrial scale: 90 million acres of Native land — two-thirds of all tribal landholdings — were stripped and sold to non-Native citizens between 1887 and 1934. Indigenous per capita wealth in 1912 was actually above white wealth. Between 1912 and 1927, it declined by approximately 50%. This was not natural economic process. It was engineered dispossession that transferred the foundational asset — land — into the hands that would build the railroad and real estate empires.

The Robber Baron Era: Building the Monopolies (1860s-1900s)

Railroad Land Grants: The First Great Public-to-Private Transfer

Between 1850 and 1871, the federal government granted 131-174 million acres of public land to railroad companies — land recently taken from Native Americans. The Union Pacific received 12,800 acres per mile of finished track. This created the first generation of American oligarchs: the Vanderbilts, Stanfords, Huntingtons, Harrimans. They did not build wealth through market competition. They received the largest government subsidy in American history up to that point.

Rockefeller and Standard Oil: The Monopoly Blueprint

John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil through a systematic program of secret railroad rebates, competitor destruction, and information warfare. The mechanism was the South Improvement Company (1871): railroads raised rates but paid rebates to Rockefeller — PLUS a "drawback" of forty cents for every barrel shipped by competitors. Standard Oil also received competitors' pricing data, enabling systematic undercutting.

Within the first three months of 1872, Rockefeller bought out, shut down, or bankrupted 22 of his 26 Cleveland competitors — the "Cleveland Massacre." By 1911, Standard Oil controlled approximately 90% of the nation's oil supply.

The Breakup Paradox: The 1911 Supreme Court dissolution was supposed to reduce monopoly power. Rockefeller owned ~25% of Standard Oil. After breakup into 33 companies, he received 25% of the stock in EACH. Combined market capitalization rapidly exceeded the parent. Rockefeller's wealth went from ~$300 million to ~$900 million. The antitrust action designed to reduce monopoly power made the monopolist three times richer. The successor companies include Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Amoco — the same companies that would dominate the petrodollar system 60 years later.

J.P. Morgan: The Private Central Bank

Before the Federal Reserve existed, J.P. Morgan functioned as America's de facto central bank. During the Panic of 1907, Morgan summoned bank leaders to his private library, ordered them to open their books, locked the doors, and refused to let anyone leave until they pledged millions to keep the system afloat.

Morgan's intervention "saved" the system — but no man amassed so much power from it. The crisis demonstrated that the American financial system rested "not on public authority but on the will and judgment of a few powerful men."

The Pujo Committee Documents the Money Trust (1912-1913)

Representative Arsene Pujo's congressional investigation found:

• 341 interlocking directorships held in 112 corporations
• Over $22 billion in resources controlled by a cartel led by J.P. Morgan
• At least 18 major financial corporations under direct Morgan control

The evidence was clear. Nobody was prosecuted.

The Federal Reserve: Privatizing the Central Bank (1913)

The Jekyll Island Meeting (November 1910)

Six men traveled in secret to the Jekyll Island Club off the coast of Georgia:

• Senator Nelson Aldrich — father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller Jr.
• Henry Davison — senior partner at J.P. Morgan
• Frank Vanderlip — president of National City Bank (a Rockefeller bank)
• Paul Warburg — partner at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. (European banking interests)
• A. Piatt Andrew — Assistant Treasury Secretary
• Arthur Shelton — Aldrich's private secretary

A member of the Jekyll Island Club — most likely J.P. Morgan himself — arranged the facilities. The meeting was kept secret. Participants didn't admit it occurred until the 1930s.

They designed a central bank owned by its member banks. In 1930, Warburg published a line-by-line comparison of the original Aldrich Plan and the final Glass-Owen Act, proving their fundamental similarity. The legislation that passed was, in structure, what the private bankers had designed in secret.

The key players: a Rockefeller in-law, a Morgan partner, a Rockefeller banker, and a European banking representative. The institution they created would, within a decade, enable the credit expansion that led to the 1929 crash.

World War I: The War Profiteering Template (1914-1918)

J.P. Morgan & Co. served as official purchasing agent for Britain and France — arranging $3+ billion in war material purchases and the largest foreign loan in Wall Street history. The Nye Committee (1934-36) held 93 hearings and questioned 200+ witnesses including J.P. Morgan Jr. and Pierre du Pont. Findings: criminal bribery of foreign officials, selling weapons to both sides, covert undermining of disarmament conferences, extraordinary profits.

DuPont provided 40% of Allied propellant powder. Stock went from $20 to $1,000.

Pattern established: Investigate, document, publish findings, prosecute nobody.

The 1920s: The First Leverage Cycle

The newly created Fed enabled the speculative boom. Andrew Mellon — one of the richest men in America — served as Treasury Secretary under three presidents (1921-1932), using his office to cut the top marginal rate from 73% to 24% while supporting businesses he owned.

By August 1929, brokers had over $8.5 billion in margin loans — more than all currency circulating in the United States. Margin accounts required only 10% down.

On September 26, 1929, J.P. Morgan Jr. and Junius Morgan sold their NYSE seats. On October 3, John D. Rockefeller sold his. Days later: Black Thursday, Black Tuesday. The insiders exited before the crash. Jesse Livermore, Bernard Baruch, Joseph P. Kennedy, and Percy Rockefeller all profited through short sales or pre-crash exits.

The Great Depression that followed was, for the wealthy who held cash, a buying opportunity at scale. Assets acquired at pennies on the dollar. The Rockefeller, Morgan, and Mellon families emerged with their power intact or enhanced, while 25% of the workforce was unemployed.

The Business Plot: The Fascist Coup Attempt (1933)

Retired Marine Major General Smedley Butler — the most decorated Marine in history — testified under oath before the McCormack-Dickstein Committee that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization, overthrow President Roosevelt, and install Butler as dictator. He was promised an army of 500,000 men.

The conspirators included Robert Sterling Clark (Singer Sewing Machine heir) and Prescott Bush. They were dissatisfied with FDR's response to the Depression — government employment programs they saw as "creeping socialism."

The committee's final report stated: "there is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient."

No one was prosecuted. The same Prescott Bush connected to the fascist coup attempt would, nine years later, be running a bank that served as a clearing house for a Nazi industrialist. And after that, his lineage would occupy the White House for 12 years.

The Unbroken Line

The documented lineage:

1. Original Sin (1600s-1860s): Slavery, opium, land theft create the capital pools. Northern banks finance the slave economy. Wall Street is physically built by enslaved people.
2. Gilded Age Monopoly (1860s-1910s): Using stolen land (railroad grants) and techniques of competitor destruction (Standard Oil), the Rockefellers, Morgans, du Ponts, and Mellons build monopolies. Morgan becomes the private central bank. The Pujo Committee documents the capture but does nothing.
3. Institutional Capture (1910-1913): The same families design the Federal Reserve at Jekyll Island. The "reform" institutionalizes their power.
4. War Profiteering (1914-1918): Morgan finances both sides. DuPont's stock rises 50x. Nye Committee documents everything. Prosecutes nobody.
5. The Leverage Cycle (1920s-1930s): Mellon (oligarch as Treasury Secretary) cuts taxes for the rich. The Fed enables a bubble. Insiders exit before the crash. The Business Plot attempts a fascist coup. Nobody prosecuted.
6. WW2 Corporate Passes (1942-1945): Same families — Bush/Harriman (Nazi banking), DuPont/GM (Wehrmacht production), Standard Oil/IG Farben (Nazi fuel) — trade with the enemy and emerge with power intact. Pattern holds: investigate, prosecute nobody.
7. The Monetary Coup (1971): Standard Oil successors and Chase Manhattan become the infrastructure for the petrodollar system. The Nixon Shock is not a break from this lineage — it is its culmination.
8. Terminal Leverage (2020s): Total debt exceeds all productive capacity. The system approaches its mathematical limits. The same families and institutions position to privatize gains one final time.

Every layer was built on the one below it. Every "reform" was captured by the reformees. Every investigation documented the crimes and prosecuted nobody. Every crisis was used to consolidate, not distribute. This is not conspiracy theory — it is the documented record of congressional investigations, court proceedings, and primary sources spanning 150 years.