Antony C. Sutton

Antony Cyril Sutton (1925 to 2002) was born in London, educated at the Universities of London, Göttingen and California, and held a research fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University from 1968 to 1973. He died in Reno, Nevada. His Hoover studies of Western technology in the Soviet economy were published in three volumes, and his later books covered the financing of the Bolshevik and Nazi movements, the Skull and Bones and other Yale University senior societies, and the Trilateral Commission.¹²³⁴

The Library of Congress name authority record gives his birth year as 1925, his birthplace as London and his death place as Reno, Nevada.³ The author note in the reissue of Wall Street and FDR states that he was later an economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles; the author note in the 1981 printing of Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution describes him as a former economics professor there and "still affiliated" with the Hoover Institution.⁴⁵ The Hoover Institution Library and Archives holds the Antony C. Sutton papers (1920 to 1972, four manuscript boxes and one microfilm reel), acquired in 1990, which contain his writings and notes on wars, civil wars and revolutions from 1820 to 1970 and on the business investments of Armand Hammer in the Soviet Union.⁶

Hoover Institution and Western Technology

Sutton began his research into the transfer of Western technology to the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. The first volume of his study, covering 1917 to 1930, was completed in 1966 and published by the Hoover Institution in November 1968. The second volume, covering 1930 to 1945, was published in 1971. The third, covering 1945 to 1965, was completed in mid-1970 and published in November 1973, under the general title Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development.²⁷

In his own account to a House subcommittee in April 1974, Sutton said that he had examined the origins of each major Soviet process or technology, and that most of his information came directly or indirectly from Soviet sources, since the relevant United States material was largely classified.¹ He described the three volumes as a precise technical examination of Soviet industry that traced where its technologies came from.²

The volumes were reviewed in academic journals. Michael R. Dohan of Queens College reviewed the second volume in the Slavic Review in December 1972 (volume 31, number 4, pages 904 to 905), and Howard J. Sherman of the University of California, Riverside reviewed the first in the American Political Science Review in September 1973 (volume 67, number 3, pages 1126 to 1128). Carl B. Turner of North Carolina State University reviewed the second volume in the same journal in September 1976 (volume 70, number 3, pages 1017 to 1018).⁸⁹¹⁰ Sutton's own bibliography, filed with the 1974 hearing, lists reviews of the first two volumes through March 1973 in Foreign Affairs (April 1969 and October 1971), Orbis, the Journal of Economic History (December 1969), the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Journal of Political Economy (March 1973), Technology and Culture (January 1973) and the American Historical Review (February 1973), among about fifty others.¹¹ His bibliography also lists two reference volumes published by Hoover, Wars and Revolutions: a comprehensive list of conflicts, with fatalities (part one 1820 to 1900, 1971; part two 1900 to 1973, 1973).¹¹

The Washington and Lee Commerce Review published his summary article "Western Technology in the Soviet Union: A Summation" in its first volume, Winter 1973.¹²

The 1972 Republican convention and National Suicide

Sutton's account of his own efforts before 1973 places a series of written testimony, articles and requests for records ahead of his book. He wrote that in 1969 he submitted written testimony to a Senate international finance subcommittee, under the title "Some aspects of Trade, Western technology and Soviet Military Capability." In 1971 he contracted with the United States Naval Institute Press for a book on the Western origins of the Soviet merchant marine, and in 1971 and 1972 he sought classified Department of Defense data for a two-volume study of military assistance to the Soviet Union.²

Sutton testified that in August 1972 he attempted to brief a national security subcommittee at the Republican convention on the problem, and that the only official response was an injunction not to make any more such speeches if he wanted to "survive." He stated that several million copies of that testimony were distributed.² The Republican platform committee held hearings for a week in Miami Beach before the convention; John J. Rhodes of Arizona was its chairman, and he named as the "wordsmith" who wrote the document Martin C. Anderson, a former White House aide then with the Hoover Institution.¹³ The platform that the Committee on Resolutions proposed on August 21, 1972 stated, in its foreign policy section, that the party would "encourage increased trade for the benefit of our consumers, businessmen, workers, and farmers."¹⁴ Human Events published Sutton's article "The East-West Trade Fight" on March 11, 1972. It states that when the time came for expropriation of the concessions of the 1920s only "the favored few," among them W. Averell Harriman, received compensation, describes the sale of 46 Centalign-B machines by the Bryant Chucking Grinder Company to the Soviet Union in 1959 for miniature ball bearing manufacture, and states that in late 1971 the Nixon administration issued one billion dollars in export licenses for the Kama truck plant.¹⁵ His bibliography also lists "The Soviet Military-Industrial Complex" in Human Events on September 9, 1972, and "It's time for Great Debate on U.S.-Soviet Trade" in Human Events on August 18, 1973.¹¹

He then assembled the material he had into National Suicide: Military Aid to the Soviet Union, published by Arlington House in New York in October 1973, after advance copies became available in July.²¹⁶ Sutton testified that the book came to the attention of the Hoover Institution in about July 1973.²

Departure from Hoover

According to Sutton's 1974 statement, his name was removed from the Hoover personnel directory after the book came to Hoover's attention. In August 1973 he was removed from his position as research fellow. He wrote that the dust jacket of the third volume, then in press, was changed to describe him as "a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1968 to 1973."²

Sutton testified that he still had an office at Hoover and received a monthly research grant, but that he was not officially connected with the institution. He wrote that Hoover emphatically disassociated itself from his testimony.² He called the treatment "reminiscent of" book burning in Adolf Hitler's Germany and asked the Congress to investigate.¹⁷

House testimony, April 1974

On April 24, 1974 Sutton appeared as a witness before the Subcommittee on International Trade of the House Committee on Banking and Currency. The hearings covered H. Res. 774, a resolution on a prohibition of Export-Import Bank credit, and bills to implement the International Economic Policy Act of 1972. The subcommittee chairman was Thomas L. Ashley of Ohio.¹

His oral summary described four sectors. He reported that he had identified 44 types of Soviet marine diesel engines, with a Western origin established for all but two. He stated that about 68 percent of Soviet merchant ships had been built completely in the West, and about 80 percent of the main diesel engines in Soviet ships had been built in the West.¹⁸ He said that he could identify no significant indigenous Soviet computer technology, and that professors in Toronto and at the Israel Institute of Technology confirmed the conclusion.¹⁸ He cited ball bearing manufacturing equipment and a plant in the Soviet Union for 10-ton military trucks built with United States firms. He concluded that Western technology went into the Soviet military-industrial complex and that the term "peaceful trade" was misleading.¹⁸ Asked by Ashley whether his conclusions were that the Soviet Union depended on the West for technology, that peaceful trade was a myth and that any exported industrial technology could be used for war, Sutton answered that this was accurate except that by "myth" he meant that the phrase diverted attention from the military use of exports.¹⁹

The other witnesses at the hearing included Franklyn D. Holzman of Tufts University, who testified immediately after Sutton and had told the subcommittee that the number of Western business arrangements in the Soviet Union of the 1920s "was larger than has commonly been believed," as Sutton had written in his books.²⁰ A prepared statement from another witness likewise referred to "the recent work by Antony C. Sutton" for the same point.²¹ On a later hearing day, Representative Ben B. Blackburn of Georgia asked Roger E. Shields, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, whether he was familiar with Sutton's research, stating that Sutton found no indigenous Soviet computer technology, and then questioned the witnesses about the 1972 sale of 164 Bryant ball bearing machines to the Soviet Union, which Sutton's testimony also described.²²

The Wall Street trilogy

Sutton's three books on finance use a common method: a chronology of named bankers and corporations, drawn from State Department files and congressional and wartime records, with the claim that a financial network linked those firms to revolutionary and fascist regimes. He described the method in the Preface to the first book, saying that the State Department Decimal File, particularly section 861.00, "contains extensive documentation on the hypothesized link."²³

Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1974)

Sutton's preface, dated March 1974, states that he set out to test an old hypothesis that "international bankers" were linked to Bolshevik revolutionaries, and that earlier attempts had rarely been supported by hard evidence.²³ He wrote that the German funding of the Bolshevik return from exile had been documented by Michael Futrell, Stefan Possony and George Katkov, and that his own work went beyond that record.²⁴

The central figure of his account is the Guaranty Trust Company of New York, which he describes as Morgan-controlled. Sutton wrote that Olof Aschberg was the Morgan agent in Russia before 1917, that Aschberg became head of Ruskombank, the first Soviet international bank, and that Max May of Guaranty Trust became director of Ruskombank's foreign department.²⁵ He wrote that William Boyce Thompson, a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, contributed one million dollars to the Bolshevik cause for propaganda purposes, a statement he said was "substantiated by a cablegram."²⁵ He describes the American International Corporation, the Guaranty Securities Company and several other firms at 120 Broadway as the center of this activity.²⁵²⁶

The synopsis adds further claims. Sutton wrote that Ludwig Martens, the first Soviet representative in the United States, was, according to the British intelligence chief Sir Basil Thomson, backed by funds from Guaranty Trust; that John Reed was financed by the New York banker Eugene Boissevain and employed by Harry Payne Whitney's Metropolitan magazine, Whitney being then a director of Guaranty Trust; that Thompson's American Red Cross Mission to Russia was a private venture and that British War Cabinet papers record Thompson's personal intervention with David Lloyd George in December 1917; and that Alexander Gumberg worked for Thompson's mission, became chief Bolshevik agent in Scandinavia, and later served as confidential assistant to Reeve Schley of Chase National Bank and to Floyd Odlum of the Atlas Corporation.²⁵ He also wrote that Wall Street firms including Guaranty Trust were involved with revolutionary activities in Mexico, that a Wall Street syndicate financed the 1912 Sun Yat-sen revolution in China, and that Colonel Edward Mandel House intervened to have Robert Minor released.²⁵ Sutton wrote that the concentration of activity at 120 Broadway, where the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the American International Corporation were located, appeared to be the foreign counterpart of Carroll Quigley's claim that J. P. Morgan had infiltrated the domestic left.²⁵

Wall Street and FDR (1975)

The second book, dated October 1974 in its preface, extends the thesis to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Sutton wrote that the evidence was based largely on Roosevelt's own papers and that Wall Street financiers were associated with Roosevelt between 1917 and 1934.²⁷ Its chapter on the 1934 Business Plot hearings describes Grayson M.-P. Murphy & Co. of 52 Broadway, and Smedley Butler's testimony that Gerald P. MacGuire proposed a plan through that firm. Sutton wrote that Murphy was, in the early 1930s, a director of several companies controlled by the J. P. Morgan interests, including the Guaranty Trust Company, and that the speechwriter proposed for Butler, John W. Davis, was a partner at Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Gardner and Reed.²⁸ He suggested that Wall Street "had none other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt in mind as 'the man on the white horse.'"²⁸

Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (1976)

The third book argues that German war preparation depended on American finance and technical transfers. Sutton quoted the Kilgore Committee of the United States Senate: "The United States accidentally played an important role in the technical arming of Germany."²⁹ He wrote that the Kilgore Committee concluded that Standard Oil, through an agreement with I.G. Farben, had "fully accomplished I.G.'s purpose" of preventing American synthetic rubber production, and that the evidence was presented to the Harry S. Truman, Bone and Kilgore committees.³⁰ His bibliography lists the Senate Military Affairs subcommittee hearings "Elimination of German Resources for War" (1945), the 1944 hearings on "Scientific and Technical Mobilization," a Field Information Agency technical intelligence report of the Control Council for Germany, the Strategic Bombing Survey plant reports, and the I.G. Farben volume of the Nuremberg tribunal records.³¹

The chapter on the Thyssen funds states that Fritz Thyssen arranged a credit of 250,000 marks for Hitler through a Dutch bank affiliated with the Harrimans. Sutton noted that Thyssen's book I Paid Hitler, published in 1941 under Thyssen's name, was later repudiated, and wrote that its account put Thyssen's contribution at as much as one million marks.³²

America's Secret Establishment (1983)

Sutton's preface, dated July 30, 1983 at Phoenix, Arizona, says that after the Wall Street series he received "an eight-inch batch of documents" that proved to be "the membership lists of an American secret society." He wrote that "the names spelled Power, with a capital P."³³ The 2002 Trine Day edition repeats the account and states that the material arrived as an anonymous donation in the early 1980s.³³³⁴

In the book he identifies the material as the "Addresses" books of the Skull and Bones society, which he describes as the membership lists back to 1832. He asked how the material reached outside hands and wrote: "It is possible that one or more members, although bound by oath, would not be dismayed if the story became public knowledge. That's all we will say."³⁵ The membership list he describes contains about 2,500 initiates.³⁶

The book's sections are organized as numbered "memoranda," in which the author sets out hypotheses. Memorandum Number Four states Hypothesis One: that a secret society comprising members of old line American families and representatives of financial power has existed since 1833.³⁶ The chart that the text places on page 19 presents the hypothesis in a radial diagram with the label "THE ORDER" at the center.³⁶

Hypothesis One and the family tiers

The chart lists nine old-line families with settlement dates and places: Whitney (1635, Watertown, Massachusetts), Stimson (1635, Watertown), Perkins (1631, Boston), Taft (1679, Braintree), Phelps (1630, Dorchester), Bundy (1635, Boston), Wadsworth (1632, Newtown), Lord (1635, Cambridge) and Gilman (1638, Hingham). It labels seven families of newer wealth with their sources of fortune: Rockefeller and Payne (Standard Oil), Harriman (railroads), Davison (J. P. Morgan), Weyerhaeuser (lumber), Pillsbury (flour milling) and Sloane (retail).³⁶

Sutton wrote that a group of 20 to 30 families had come to dominate the society, and that the families fell into two groups. The first were "old line American families who arrived on the East coast in the 1600s, e.g., Whitney, Lord, Phelps, Wadsworth, Allen, Bundy, Adams." The second were "families who acquired wealth in the last 100 years, sent their sons to Yale and in time became almost old line families, e.g., Harriman, Rockefeller, Payne, Davison."³⁷ He wrote that intermarriage among these families was common, and that the Puritan families "either intermarried with financial power" or took in the sons of money.³⁶

Sutton's book calls Charles Phelps Taft, a member of the Yale class of 1918, a nephew of William Howard Taft and places him at the Twentieth Century Foundation.³⁸ The Yale obituary record for William Howard Taft lists a Charles Phelps, 2d, B.A. 1918 and LL.B. 1921, among Taft's own children.³⁹ The Yale record of the President's half brother, Charles Phelps Taft (B.A. 1864, 1843 to 1929), lists "Charles P. Taft, 2d, '18" among that half brother's nephews.⁴⁰ The Yale class of 1918 member is therefore the President's son and the nephew of the elder Charles Phelps Taft.

Brown Brothers Harriman, Union Banking and Prescott Bush

Sutton's account of the Brown Brothers Harriman partnership says that by the 1970s the firm had "taken in so many of 'the Brotherhood'" that, of its 26 individual partners, "no fewer than 9 were members of The Order."⁴¹ The list he gives of partners who were members includes Prescott Bush, whom he describes as a partner for over forty years, the father of President George H. W. Bush, and initiated in 1917. It also includes W. Averell Harriman (initiated 1913) and his brother E. Roland Harriman (initiated 1917).⁴¹

Sutton devotes a passage to the Union Banking Corporation of New York. He writes that Union Banking had eight directors, including four members of the Yale class of 1917, that Guaranty Trust was represented by Knight Woolley, that two directors, Kouwenhoven and Groninger, were Nazi directors of the Rotterdam bank Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart, which he identifies as the former von Heydt bank, and that Prescott Bush and Ellery S. James were partners in Brown Brothers, later Brown Brothers, Harriman.⁴¹⁴² In The Rise of Hitler he describes Union Banking as a joint Thyssen and Harriman operation, with E. Roland Harriman as a director in 1932.⁴²⁴³

The Stimson and Bundy chain

The book's section "The Whitney-Stimson-Bundy-Acheson Chain of Influence" follows a family line through a sequence of offices. Sutton wrote that Henry L. Stimson went to work for the Root firm in 1890 after Yale and Harvard Law School, married the daughter of a Skull and Bones member, was appointed Secretary of War by William Howard Taft in 1911, and held offices under every president from Taft through Truman except Warren G. Harding.⁴⁴ He wrote that Stimson brought Harvey Hollister Bundy into the wartime Pentagon as a special assistant, and that Stimson brought Harvey's son McGeorge Bundy into the Pentagon to work on the 1948 book On Active Service in Peace and War.⁴⁴ Sutton summarized the pattern as Stimson using his office "to advance the career of fellow members of The Order," naming Harvey Hollister Bundy and McGeorge Bundy.⁴⁴

Sutton's account of Stimson in the Second World War also refers to the atomic bombing of Japan, which he says Stimson recommended in 1945.⁴⁴

Phoenix Letter and the Yale senior societies

Sutton's October 1984 issue of the Phoenix Letter, which named him as editor and was published by Research Publications at a Phoenix, Arizona post office box, argues that the three Yale senior societies, Skull and Bones (Russell Trust), Scroll and Key (Kingsley Trust) and Wolf's Head (Phelps Trust), form a network. It states that Scroll and Key had been founded by members of Skull and Bones, and that "three quarters of the inner core" had been identified in his diagram of the society.⁴⁵ The same issue cites George Wilson Pierson's official history of Yale, and it states that the Elihu society catalog lists Anson Phelps Stokes as a Skull and Bones member and an honorary member of Elihu since its founding in 1903.⁴⁵ The newsletter also says that it had not yet accounted for the power of Edward Mandel House, whom it had earlier identified as a friend of Yale initiates in the society.⁴⁵

Sutton's booklet How the Order Controls Education is catalogued by archive.org with a 1985 date.⁴⁶

Trilaterals Over America and later works

Sutton's book on the Trilateral Commission, in the 1995 edition titled Trilaterals Over America, states that the commission was founded in 1973 by the New York banker David Rockefeller, then chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, and the Harvard academic Zbigniew Brzezinski, later National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter. Its appendix lists members as of October 1978 and July 1993.⁴⁷ The book refers to an earlier volume, Trilaterals Over Washington, written with Patrick M. Wood and published in Scottsdale, Arizona, by the August Corporation (the Library of Congress record gives c1978, 1979 printing).⁴⁷⁴⁸ The 1995 book directs readers to the Phoenix Letter, then in its twelfth year, at an address in Billings, Montana.⁴⁷

His later titles include The War on Gold (1977), Energy: The Created Crisis (1979), The Federal Reserve Conspiracy (1995) and Cold Fusion: The Secret Energy Revolution (1999), each catalogued by archive.org.⁴⁹

Death and the 2002 edition

Sutton's copyright page for America's Secret Establishment gives 1983, 1986 and 2002. The 2002 Trine Day edition includes a section on the Yale catalogue compiled by Kris Millegan.³⁴ Sutton died in 2002 in Reno, Nevada.³⁴