Easy Chair Series

Dorothy Rushdoony's Birthday; Chicago Crime; Marc Rich; Contracts; Colonial Powers; Understanding Today's Culture; Kiss As Legal Act; Husband's Compliment to Wife; Supermarket Tabloids; Entrepreneurs; Hamilton Fish; Liberation Theology; David Estrada Herrero; Family

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 11-91

Genre:

Track:

Dictation Name: EC143

Year: 1986

This R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 143, April 10, 1987.

April 10 is an important day in my life because it is Dorothy’s birthday. So I am feeling especially happy on this occasion as I share some of these readings and thinkings of the past few weeks with you.

I am going to start with a book Prince of Crime by John Morgan, published by Simon Day in New York in 1985.

It deals with the criminal elements in Chicago in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and on, a very interesting book. But before I get into it, I want to deal with one point that John Morgan, a Britisher, brings out. Namely, he says that we have to recognize that the criminal mobs as well as the political bosses in American cities are of a Catholic background. He does not go into this, but I think it is an important fact to look into and to recognize why there has been a shift on the cultural dominance of various groups. It is an ironic fact that Catholics now control the urban populations by and large, because the problem at the time of the Reformation was precisely the reverse, namely, that while the Catholic Church and the Catholic nobility were in nominal control, they were actually facing a rebellious, urban population.

Before the Reformation for some time previous the growth of towns and cities had been a threat to the established order. One of the things that pope Gregory VII or Hildebrand had sought to do several hundred years prior to the Reformation was to prevent the nobility from monopolizing and parochializing the Church, because what they had done was to seize control of the churches within their domain. They did this by naming their sons to be bishops and abbots and controlling the churches through their children, that is other than the son who was to succeed as the local lord. As a result, the life of the church was absorbed into the life of the local aristocracy. Hildebrand fought against this and rightly so. His purpose was to make the church free of the local lords. And so what he did was to institute a requirement of sacerdotal celibacy so that there would not be a hereditary priesthood controlled by a bishop through his descendants of a {?} and so on.

Well, in time, however, although Hildebrand accomplished a great deal and gave Europe a new lease on life, this was undercut. The towns and cities dropped under the control of bishops and lords. And the bishops, while now celibate were still relatives of these powerful lords. As a result, the city’s population and the town population felt an antithesis to church and state in their time. The antipathy was because these two elements were governed by men who where hostile to the new bourgeois or middle class element. They wanted to control them. They wanted to use them. And as a result they did not feel comfortable with the urban population.

For this reason the urban population was the backbone of the Reformation. They were the ones who were most ready to see reform. They were the ones who fought most before the Reformation both against the lords and the bishops.

Well, throughout Europe the cities had a problem with lords and with bishops.

After the Reformation and the counter Reformation the monarchs began to seize the initiative from the church and the lords and increasingly gain power by an alliance with the cities. Although even then some tried to maintain their existence. For example, Louis XIV built Versailles outside the urban center, Paris. However, because the church was now faced with large urban populations, the Catholic Church began to deal with the missions to the urban community. Whereas with Pietism, Protestantism tendeth to withdraw. One of the key moments in this withdraw, I believe, came in England and was echoed elsewhere in Protestant countries when the railroad was built.

With the advent of the railroads and of steel mills and other things that required continuous operation, the Protestant clergy failed. They did not see that works of necessity which they had recognized on the agricultural level, namely, you have to milk cows seven days a week and a calf that falls into a pit is to be rescued on the Lord’s Day, they did not transfer this kind of thoroughly scriptural thinking to works of necessity in a modern, industrial civilization.

As a result, they began to lose control of the cities. And one reason for the tremendous growth of Catholic urban power from the middle of the last century to the present time has been because there were men within the church who did see that they had to have a ministry to an urban, industrial population.

Thus, when you look at the gangsters of this century what you have to recognize is that only a few outsiders, as it were, came of a Protestant background. Protestants were irrelevant, by and large, to the urban culture. Millions of them lived in the cities, but they had no impact on them and, thus, the political control, good and bad, and the criminal power, uniformly bad, was in the hands of people who were nominally Catholic.

The notable Protestant figures in the world of crime were men like Dillinger and his gang coming from a Midwestern rural background. Dillinger, I believe, had a Congregational background, although, of course, a man without faith. And Ma Barker and her boys also were rural. Such people were using the city as a place to raid for wealth, but their basic outlook was external to the city.

So this is the reason why Protestantism began to recede after 1850. It was irrelevant to an urban culture.

Civilization has its ties, its changes. What the future will be we cannot predict. But strange things do take place. The Roman Empire was an urban culture. The church was urban, predominantly urban. With the fall of Rome the church had a totally different situation. The urban population suffered dramatically from war and from plagues. They were decimated again and again.

So, with the fall of Rome the church had to deal with a rural population everywhere and to begin again a new kind of mission dealing with rural peoples and many of them barbarians.

What will happen in the next century we cannot predict, but it certainly isn’t going to be a rerun of the 20th and the church had better be aware of the fact that changes are coming and be prepared to meet them and to do something about them.

Well, now, to return again to Prince of Crime by John Morgan. As I said at the beginning, he calls attention to the fact that the city bosses were overwhelmingly of a Catholic background, whatever their nationality, and the criminals also. There were a few exceptions. There were a few and Morgan says their number has been greatly exaggerated because a few who are in crime were so important, a few who were Jewish and then a very, very slim number, almost non existent, who were Protestant. But the key figure in Chicago and one of the key figures in the history of crime in the United States was a Protestant with a Calvinistic background, Welsh, whose name was Llewellyn Humphreys.

Now Humphreys had no faith. In fact, his parents really had apparently left the faith, but he did still have something of a hard headed Calvinistic thinking from his parents. His motto, by the way, reflected his strong sense of original sin and total depravity. His motto, which he had framed wherever he was was this, “Love thy crooked neighbor as you love thy crooked self.”

Well, the amazing thing is that Humphreys who was the brains of the Chicago mob had very little education, but was a very highly intelligent and well informed man. He dropped out of school at the age of seven. He began selling newspapers and in those days to have a street corner location meant you were involved with criminal activity.

He was arrested for theft at the age of 13 or 14 and it was the judge whose name was Murray who inducted him into the criminal mob. And so in honor of the judge he was known as Murray Humphreys after that. And some time as Murray the Hump from his name Humphreys which also led to another nickname of Murray the Camel from hump in Humphreys.

Now Humphreys did a number of things. He was really the brains behind the Capone mob. And he got very disgusted with Capone because of his love of publicity and Humphreys liked anonymity.

The author says that Humphreys could have gotten Capone off, but he made no move to do so because he felt Capone had become a liability. It was Humphreys who first utilized the Fifth Amendment plea. It was Humphreys who first moved into the control of unions. In fact, because his wife was so fond of the film industry it was Humphreys who moved into Hollywood and {?} and Brown were his protégés. In one area after another, the key figure was Humphreys.

Now Humphreys was also very important in inaugurating the laundering of money, of moving it into legitimate enterprises and of controlling them also. He also as very, very important in politics not only on the local and the state levels, but the federal level. Very powerful, in fact. Among those whom he knew as a friend was Harry Truman. In fact, Harry Truman showed him around the White House and more when he was in Washington. Another man whom he decided to elect as president and had very good personal contact with was Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is interesting why he dumped a friend. Humphreys dumped Adlai Stevenson.

As Don Morgan says, “There are two reasons for charity. One is a godly motive, a Christian motive. Another is to demonstrate your power.”

And the mob liked to be charitable where it counted, where it gave them publicity. And one of those things they sought to do not long after the war when housing was in short supply was to put up a housing project for very low income people.

Well, the decks were cleared for action through their man in the statehouse, Stevenson. But Stevenson got into the act some friends who were contractors who did a crooked job. The housing project was a masterpiece of shoddiness with the result that it made the mob look bad. So when they saw that Stevenson was going to run for the presidency, they were determined that his opposition was going to win and they saw to it that he did.

Humphreys was important again in subsequent election in that one of his rivals in the bootlegging days and sometimes his ally was Joe Kennedy, the father of John F. Kennedy. And so he decided to help an old friend’s son. And Kennedy won the election fraudulently. Chicago delivered the key votes and it was a dishonest election that Nixon unfortunately refused to contest. And so Humphreys was able to deliver.

By the way, we often hear nowadays about great civil libertarian lawyer Clarence Darrow. He became a hero in part because of the scopes trial and Darrow’s move against evolution, anti evolutionary legislation in Tennessee. Well, Clarence Darrow was the lawyer for the mob on more than few occasions. A very interesting book and exceptionally well written.

One little side light which I thought was very, very funny... By the way, Morgan says that the idea that it was Prohibition that brought in the gangsters and the racketeers is nonsense. They were all well established before World War I. But at any rate, one of the early, very powerful mob leaders in Chicago was Mike McDonald and Mike McDonald apparently got very upset when reporters said he was responsible for giving Chicago the title of sin city. And as Morgan writes it, “Mike said that he was shocked. He had only committed crime, never a sin,” unquote.

A very interesting book and good reading, a very revealing book on what goes on in this country.

Now to another that is related. It deals with white collar crime. It is a book published in 1985, no longer available in hardback. I have the hardback copy. It was published by G. T. Putnam Son. The book is by A. Craig Copetas, C O P E T A S, Metal Men: Mark Rich and the 10 Billion Dollar Scam.

This deals with one aspect of the commodity market, the metal men. A key aspect and where all kinds of evil is concentrated where, as the author says, “Sportsmanship is never tolerated.”

Now these men also moved into oil. All kinds of strange people are tied up with them very closely. For example, when Mark Rich was finally tried on a whole series of charges, an unbelievable number of offenses for which he was indicted, racketeering, mail and wire fraud, tax evasion, conspiracy, price fixing, possible charges of treason and so on. His very close coworkers and associates included the Soviet Union. Though Pravda wrote articles accusing the US of a witch hunt after a very fine men, one of his partners was Kissinger. Another partner was ambassador Wilson at the Vatican. And the Vatican bank apparently was used and to an extent implicated. An amazing book. And these are men who have been involved on a world scale with every kind of civil government.

When he was arrested, the prosecutor, Sandy Weinberg, a conservative estimate of the amount Rich owed in back taxes, 96 millions. However, they began to feel that the figure might double or triple or quadruple before they were through.

Well, finally Rich settled as the data began to accumulate. He settled on the tax charges. And it is interesting how he settled. Let me quote from page 216.

“It cost Mark Rich 340 million to get off the hook. Not including interest and lost revenues that pushed the real loses close to one billion, he paid 150 million dollars in government fines stemming from the guilty plea, 21 million in fines paid since June 1983 at the rate of 50,000 dollars a day, 780,000 dollars in fines on the charges, 33,00 in court costs and some 10 million in legal fees to his attorneys. The United States had already withheld nearly 37 million in cash of seized Mark Rich assets.

“Mark Rich, AG, also repaid debts of 130 million dollars to 14 creditor banks led by Chase Manhattan and agreed to forfeit the right to use the 150 million dollars payment as a tax liability which could have amounted to some 24 to 40 million dollars in write-offs. {?} Meltzer was handed the suspended three year sentence and was placed on five years probation and so on.

“However, they are still limited to Switzerland and Spain and a few other places. They cannot return to the United States without facing all the other charges. And yet some say that the money did not even dent his business, his wealth or his power.”

It is quite a remarkable book and I commend it to you. It is exceptionally important reading. The importance of this book as a side light into what is happening all over the world in Asia, Africa, behind the Iron Curtain, in the so-called free West, everywhere is a revealing account of where we are, of the cultural decline and degeneracy.

One interesting little sidelight. In our journal a while back Otto Scott had a remarkable article on what has happened to contracts, how the oil prices led to the death of contracts and of integrity.

Well, the author A. Craig Copetas makes a like point and he dates it to 1973. He says that in that year contracts died. Neither nations nor courts were ready to consider their significance or their integrity. And, as a result, we are in the midst of decline. As one person commented to Copetas, “The world changed in 1973. The old ways of trust were gone. Everybody started breaking contracts. Prices were changing too quickly for people to keep their word. The value system I had built a business on changed. Trading has never been the same since. Everybody got greedy,” unquote.

Well, these two books, John Morgan’s Prince of Crime and A. Craig Copetas’ Metal Men: Mark Rich and the 10 Billion Dollar Scam, are very, very important books in telling us about the problem we face in the world today.

I am going to turn now to an older book, one first published in 1925, reprinted in 1935 and again in 1969 by the Negro University’s Press. It is a book that deals with a man’s experiences well before World War I and up to the early 20s. The author, Major Henry Darley, D A R L E Y, Slaves and Ivory in Abyssinia: A Record of Adventure and Exploration Among the Ethiopian Slave Traders.

The book is quite important because what it deals with is the foreign powers, the colonial powers in Africa prior to World War I in the main. And we see both the fact that they did bring a lot of good to Africa and also that they were losing their own moral perspective, their own focus on reality. For example, he says that although slavery had been banned by the colonial powers, they were unwilling to do anything about the fact that Abyssinia, now called Ethiopia, was dealing in the slave trade, was raiding the Sudan, for example, and surrounding territories, to take countless numbers of people prisoner to be sold as slaves.

And yet when, again and again, this was proven to be true, the British government evaded responsibility by stating that those raids were mainly of ivory and the slaves that had been taken were incidental.

Now that was an evasion, of course, as Major Darley, an Englishman, points out. The raids were for both ivory and slaves, but by calling them ivory raids they eliminated the necessity for action.

Because Darley became something of a problem by going into Ethiopia even though he went by permission, British permission, they revoked it after he left beaus they were afraid this morally righteous man although an ivory trader, might embarrass them with his clear cut moral stance. And so they issued instead a warrant for his arrest. The only reason he escaped arrest was that each time he came to an English diplomatic outpost, he found someone who was a fellow club member back in England or a school chum and he could use them to pull wires to get the whole thing filed of the time being.

Darley says that it is a proverb or was in his day a proverb, “It does not pay to help the British government.” And he gives all kinds of illustrations. He is a very loyal Britisher, but very contemptuous of the foreign office.

Well, his account of what Africa was in those days is very interesting. He says that the white man equals law and order. He says that wherever he went he found this to be true, that the further they were from the white civil outposts, the less the law. In fact, he found in Ethiopia, the one country not under white rule, people would slip into his tent at night and say, “When will the white men come and bring us justice?”

At the same time, Darley tells us a great deal about the black man as he encountered him in much of Africa. He is very fond of the blacks, or was. He and all the other characters in this book are long since dead. And he says that he found that they were farm more trustworthy than other peoples, but they had two weaknesses. And these two held them back.

The African point of view is that manual labor is degrading. Therefore, you need slaves or very poor people whom you can control to do the work. The other aspect is that if you have power, you use it. You never confuse power with morality. And he gives examples of men who became slaves and then got their freedom, who refused to learn anything from their slavery. They were just as bad a slave owner afterwards.

This is the kind of thing that he says is the curse of Africa. And if this is overcome and, of course, Christianization, we would say, is the only way out, then the hope for Africa is tremendous. It is a very, very interesting account and one of the most informative books you can read on Africa.

Incidentally, The Hostility to Work, another writer who was in Ethiopia gave much documentation on. He said that if a very important family was through various circumstances impoverished, it was still unthinkable for one of their daughters to go to one of the embassies and work as a secretary. That was degrading. But to work as a prostitute was respectable.

If you can find this book in a library, I promise you that you will find it difficult to put down. It is, let me say, again, by Major Henry Darley, Slaves and Ivory in Abyssinia.

Well, now on to another book, this by Roger L. Williams, The Horror of Life, an English book published in 1980, now out of print. And the thesis of it is that to understand why our culture is what it is today we need to realize the kind of people who shaped it, who molded it. And he takes, by way of demonstration of what he has to say, France in the last century, certain key figures: Charles Baudelaire, Jules de Goncourt, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, and Alphonse Daudet, very prominent writers, especially the first four.

These are the ones who set the temper of the modern outlook and others like them, of course, in Britain and in Germany and elsewhere. And what he has to say about these men can be documented of others elsewhere, of Nietzsche and of others. And he says that all of these men who had an unremitting pessimism and disgust towards life had a common factor. They were moral degenerates who were venereally diseased and the disease progressively took over and shaped their outlook and their lives.

As a result, they represented a warped outlook. And he said, and I quote, “For Baudelaire’s generation, as for those of prior generations, an attack of syphilis may have been incapacitating and uncomfortable, embarrassing or humiliating to those who had a secret life to conceal, even a source of pride for those who had something to prove. But no association between a syphilitic infection and what we now know to be the tertiary stage of untreated syphilis such as general paralysis or tabes dorsalis has gained medical ... had gained medical acceptance,” unquote.

And he goes on to say what this did to the minds of these people and in that kind of mentality, they shaped the modern mentality.

The one person who was not given to the same savage hatred of life was Daudet. But with the anti Christianity of the culture it was these diseased men who were the heroes of the culture, who helped shape the thinking of the generations to come, who despised everything that was godly and who, by the way, regarded America with contempt and taught Americans themselves to have that kind of contempt.

And they had a very common conviction that America was a cultural wasteland. And if you were a part of the in group, the elite group, you would agree with them, that America was a cultural wasteland.

Now briefly to an older work, one by a scholar at the University of California, Nicholas James Perella, The Kiss: Sacred and Profane, published in 1969.

It is an interesting historical study, but one thing is among many, many more that deal with church history and so on, one little item I thought was very interesting and I quote, “Under Roman law of the empire, the kiss bestowed by the male at betrothal gave juridical rights to the woman who thereby became a quasi upsor, this failure to follow with marriage carried severe sanctions. So, too, the kiss determined the legality of the disposition of betrothal gifts and other property in the event one of the partners died before marriage.”

Now this fact is very interesting because it was the kiss that gave legal validity to the engagement, which made it a binding fact. And it survived and we have it to an extent to this day in the fact that at the end of the marriage service you may now kiss the bride, so that it is still a part of a legal service, of a legal act.

Very briefly to another book by Steven Ozment, O Z M E N T, Magdalena and Balthazar: An Intimate Portrait of Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife, published in 1986 by Simon and Shuster for 16.95.

Now what tickled me in this which is a series of letters as the businessman travels and his wife gives a report and her management of things, is this. The wife was a very capable woman and the husband appreciated her, because she was superb as a trouble shooter, often very outspoken, knowing how to put people in their place. But as he said in this sentence, which was apparently a proverb in that day in describing her in a letter to her dated December 15, 1582.

“But you already know well how to stroke the tail of the fox, of that I have no doubt.”

Stroking the tail of a fox. Now that takes something to do, quite a complement he paid to his wife to say that she had that capability.

Now I am going to turn to something quite radically different. A recent column, one of March the 23rd by Chalcedon’s John Lofton in the Washington Times. The title is, “Leading our Minds into the Sewer.” And here it is. I quote.

“I recently bought a week’s worth of the most prominent supermarket tabloids to find out what the real world cares about. Millions and millions and millions of people read these things, you know. And it is obvious that by comparison the National Enquirer is losing out to its competitors. In fact, when you look at some of its competition, the Enquirer now seems conservative. The Enquirer, may, indeed, be for inquiring minds as its ads say, but it is some of these other tabloids that are really making us think.

“For example, here are some of the headlines from just the front page of a recent issue of The Sun weekly tabloid published in Montreal, Canada. ‘Liberace had a Secret Daughter Born in 1945.’ ‘Baby Born Talking Gives Dad Winning Lottery Number and He Becomes a Millionaire.’ ‘Dead Mother Appears at Son’s Wedding.’ ‘Bag Lady Ships Self 2000 Miles in Cardboard Box.’ ‘Wife Kills Hubby and Mails Head to his Mistress.’ And last, but certainly not least, ‘Midget Flushed Down Toilet by Mistake.’

“And inside this issue of The Sun are other stories headlined ‘Man Who Ate Corpses Suffers Indigestion.’ ‘Talking Parrot Helps Woman Give Birth.’ ‘Gorilla Saves Life of Choking Zoo Keeper.’ ‘Quick Thinking Ape Performs Heimlich Maneuver.’ And ‘Dead Soldiers Skinned to Make a Drum.’

“Now I don’t know about you, but for me, while I went straight to the story about the midget, the story the prank that became a washout as another headline inside put it. And while I originally intended to have a good belly laugh, this story, as it turned out, is no laughing matter.

“Or actually, to put it more accurately, the way the story turned out it is ok to laugh because all is well that ends well. And this story ended well. But I am getting ahead of myself.

“As some reporter Richard Dominic tells it, ‘What began as a practical joke ended in all together now near tragedy when a circus midge was accidentally flushed down a toilet, sent on a harrowing ride through a mile of sewer pipes and dumped into the river.’

“Ok, so what is the story? Well, the midget {?} says he was just trying to play a joke on the circus’ bearded lady. So far so good. There is nothing wrong, necessarily, with trying to play a joke on a fellow employee, especially if both of you work in the circus. And even bearded ladies need to laugh now and then, right? Right.

“Well, then midget {?} says, “I was hiding in the toilet in her room. When she was about to use it, I was going to jump out and scare her, but I wound up fighting for my life.’

“Now it is here that we begin to understand why things went all awry. Because under no circumstances should anyone of any size for any reason ever hide in another person’s toilet. And, boy, did things go wrong. As reporter Dominic chronicles this ensuing saga, instead of picking up the lid of the old fashioned toilet, {?} the bearded lady, accidentally pulled down the chain that flushes the toilet. This sent 42 inch high {?} on his terror filled ride through the sewer system of Poznan, Poland.

“The obviously repentant bearded lady {?} said, ‘I thought I was pulling down the chain to turn on the bathroom light. I had no idea I was flushing {?} into the river.’ Oh, and since the old fashioned toilet had an opening almost 18 inches in diameter, the 48 pound {?}, we are told, was easily sucked into the sewer pipes leading to the rapidly flowing river.

“Ok. So {?} is sincerely sorry. She says this was an accident and I, for one, accept her apology at face value. But nonetheless, what happened was still horrible. And under no circumstances should those of you reading this, particularly children, try this at home, says {?} in a statement that rings true to me.

“‘I thought for sure I was going to drown.’

“But as the water washed him into the sewers he was, thank God, able to keep his head above the water to breath. As the tiny—and I would add game, little circus performer—recalled it, “After a while the small pipe emptied out into a much bigger one and I was pushed along for almost a mile. I knew I was going to be thrown into the river. I was praying the waters would be calm and I could swim to safety.’

“But {?} was still in danger. When he splashed into the river the rapids were strong and he continued his terrifying ride for almost three miles.

“He said, ‘I was tumbled through the water, certain I would drown or be impaled on an old tree trunk at the banks.’

“Eventually {?} grabbed hold of a rock and climbed on top. He says, ‘I waited for hours until somebody came walking by and I screamed for help.’

“Unaware of {?} precise dilemma, which is understandable, I mean, who would guess he might have been flushed down a toilet and, by all of all people, the bearded lady, circus workers had begun searching for their star performer.

“Says one circus official, ‘It was unlike {?} to miss a performance. When he didn’t show up, we thought something terrible might have happened to him, but we never would have guessed the bearded lady had flushed him down the toilet.’

“But, as I say, all is well that ends well and horrifying as this whole thing was and undoubtedly still is for little {?}, {?} and their friends and loved ones and all of them there is still a lesson to be learned and it is this. If you are a midget, never ever hide in the toilet of a bearded lady, not even as a joke. And remember. You read about this near tragedy here first, unless, of course, you read The Sun, in which case you are reading about this event here second.”

Thank you, John. That was a delight.

A couple of other little items to pass on to you apropos of nothing except the desire to share a little humor with you, I like the story about the man who was talking to his psychiatrist and he complained, “My wife is so immature. Every time I take a bath she comes in and sinks all my boats.”

Or this story about the kindergarten teacher who was telling her kindergarten students at the beginning of the term how she expected them to behave. And she said that they couldn’t just get up and wander off to the bathroom and the way to handle the situation was if anyone has to go to the bathroom, hold up two fingers.

One puzzled little boy after a little while raised his hand and asked? “How is that going to help, teacher?”

Well, now on to something else, just briefly. One of the stories among many which I liked in Donald Lambro’s most recent book Land of Opportunity: The Entrepreneurial Spirit in America, published in Boston by Little Brown and Company in 1986 has this little item. And the book is a gem because it tells us about the opportunities and how individuals are using these opportunities to make fortunes. Let me quote this one.

“When Frederick W. Smith was an undergraduate at Yale in the mid 1960s he wrote a paper for an economics class outlining his idea for a company that would provide next day delivery service across the country for letters and packages that absolutely, positively have to be there overnight. The company, he wrote, would have its own fleet of jets and vans and deliver parcels in anywhere in the United States. Smith’s professor gave him a C on his paper, but in the early 1970s at the age of 27 Frederick W. Smith turned his vision into Federal Express which for a mere 11 dollars would jet your paper or package anywhere in the country and personally deliver it to its destination by 10:30 the next morning.

“At first Smith’s losses were high, 29 million in the first two years of operation largely as a result of high energy prices triggered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo. But after that, his company revenues rose steadily. Today Federal Express delivers 450,000 packages and letters a night. The company grossed 1.4 billion dollars in revenues in 1984 earning post tax profits totally 115 million dollars,” unquote.

Well, I wonder what his professor thinks now. Quite a story.

Now on to another book, very briefly, which I suggest you get before it is out of print. It was published in 1983 by Devon Adair Publishers, Old Greenwich, Connecticut by Hamilton Fish, Tragic Deception: FDR and America’s Involvement in World War II.

Hamilton Fish was a great man of the early years of this century. He fought in World War I commanding black troops. Long before anyone else thought about it, he championed civil rights. He fought against Roosevelt and our involvement in World War II. He gives us some of the very ugly facts behind the story of World War II. Our time is virtually up, so I don’t have time to go into it, but I strongly recommend that before this book disappears, you order it and read it. It is an exceedingly important work.

Well, our time is up. Just a brief note. We have been asked—it was Billy Welch who did—that we give a talk on liberation theology. We might at some time in the future, but for the present we do have one of our men, Dr. David Estrada Herrero working on a book on liberation theology. And since David can read Portuguese and Spanish as well as English, he has access to the key documents and this will be a very important book.

Then David Porter asked us to deal with the role of the family through the past two centuries, a very important subject. I am writing a book on the family which makes this a little more difficult to make that a topic of discussion because I don’t know where to stop if I get on the subject.

Well, our time is up. God bless you all and it has been good to have this time with you. Thank you.